Samur Dalya, Lai Vicky T, Hagoort Peter, Willems Roel M
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, Kapittelweg 29, 6525 EN Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, 1512 Pendleton St., Columbia, SC 29208, United States.
Neuropsychologia. 2015 Nov;78:108-14. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.10.003. Epub 2015 Oct 9.
Emotions are often expressed metaphorically, and both emotion and metaphor are ways through which abstract meaning can be grounded in language. Here we investigate specifically whether motion-related verbs when used metaphorically are differentially sensitive to a preceding emotional context, as compared to when they are used in a literal manner. Participants read stories that ended with ambiguous action/motion sentences (e.g., he got it), in which the action/motion could be interpreted metaphorically (he understood the idea) or literally (he caught the ball) depending on the preceding story. Orthogonal to the metaphorical manipulation, the stories were high or low in emotional content. The results showed that emotional context modulated the neural response in visual motion areas to the metaphorical interpretation of the sentences, but not to their literal interpretations. In addition, literal interpretations of the target sentences led to stronger activation in the visual motion areas as compared to metaphorical readings of the sentences. We interpret our results as suggesting that emotional context specifically modulates mental simulation during metaphor processing.
情感常常通过隐喻来表达，情感和隐喻都是能使抽象意义在语言中落地生根的方式。在此，我们专门研究与动作相关的动词在隐喻使用时，相较于其字面使用时，是否对先前的情感语境有不同的敏感性。参与者阅读以模糊的动作/运动句子结尾的故事（例如，“他得到了它”），其中该动作/运动根据先前的故事可以隐喻地解释（他理解了这个想法）或字面地解释（他接住了球）。与隐喻操作正交的是，这些故事的情感内容高或低。结果表明，情感语境调节了视觉运动区域对句子隐喻解释的神经反应，但对其字面解释没有调节作用。此外，与句子的隐喻解读相比，目标句子的字面解释在视觉运动区域引发了更强的激活。我们将研究结果解释为表明情感语境在隐喻处理过程中专门调节心理模拟。
