The superiority of up/down over left/right in metaphorical association with emotion

Abstract

Positive valence links to the upside and dominant side, while negative valence is associated with the downside and non-dominant side (i.e., space-valence metaphor). Previous studies indicate that the effect of the vertical-valence metaphor is more salient than that of the horizontal-valence metaphor. Furthermore, this difference in the saliency is possibly connected with whether the experimental task is related to reaction time (RT) or not. The present study empirically examined these hypotheses; we conducted both the RT and non-RT tasks (i.e., detection task and pointing task, respectively) and compared these results. We found that the effect of the vertical-valence metaphor occurred in both the RT and non-RT tasks, while the typical impact of the horizontal-valence metaphor was not found in both the tasks. Our findings suggest that the effect of the vertical-valence metaphor is salient while the impact of the horizontal-valence metaphor is not robust. Moreover, this difference in the saliency was independent of the kinds of experimental tasks.