Zhao Xueru, He Xianyou, Zhang Wei
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, School of Psychology, South China Normal University Guangzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2016 Jun 21;7:920. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00920. eCollection 2016.
People often express emotion in language using weight (e.g., a heavy heart, light-hearted, light humor, or heavy-handed), but the question remains whether these expressions of emotion are rooted in the body. Six experiments used a priming paradigm to explore the metaphoric relation between weight perception and emotional words. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the influence of weight perception on judgments of emotional words and the influence of emotional words on judgments of weight, respectively. A significant difference between the consistent condition (e.g., lightness corresponds to positive words and heaviness corresponds to negative words) and the inconsistent condition (e.g., lightness corresponds to negative words and heaviness corresponds to positive words) was found in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 were conducted to exclude potential confounds. Experiment 6 was a repeated-measures study that was conducted to verify the weight-emotion effect. The study confirmed that weight perception affected judgments of emotional words. The results contribute to the growing literature on conceptual metaphor theory and embodied cognition theory.
人们经常在语言中使用重量来表达情感（例如，心情沉重、轻松愉快、轻松幽默或严厉），但问题仍然是这些情感表达是否源于身体。六个实验使用启动范式来探索重量感知与情感词汇之间的隐喻关系。实验1和实验2分别研究了重量感知对情感词汇判断的影响以及情感词汇对重量判断的影响。在实验1中发现了一致条件（例如，轻盈对应积极词汇，沉重对应消极词汇）和不一致条件（例如，轻盈对应消极词汇，沉重对应积极词汇）之间的显著差异，但在实验2中未发现。进行实验3、4和5以排除潜在的混淆因素。实验6是一项重复测量研究，旨在验证重量 - 情感效应。该研究证实重量感知会影响情感词汇的判断。这些结果为关于概念隐喻理论和具身认知理论的不断增长的文献做出了贡献。
