Emotional experiences are often described in metaphoric language. A major question in linguistics and cognitive science is whether such metaphoric linguistic expressions reflect a deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts structured by the embodied, sensorimotor domains that we use to describe them? This review presents the argument for conceptual metaphors of affect and summarizes recent findings from empirical studies. These findings show that, consistent with the conceptual metaphor account, the associations between affect and physical domains such as spatial position, (...) musical pitch, brightness, and size which are captured in linguistic metaphors also influence performance on attention, memory and judgment tasks. Despite this evidence, a number of concerns with metaphor as an account of affect representation are considered. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that people's understanding of the abstract domain of time is dependent on the more concrete domain of space. Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002) found that spatial context influences whether people see themselves as moving through time (ego-moving perspective) or as time moving towards them (time-moving perspective). Based on studies of the embodiment of affective experience, we examined whether affect might also influence which spatial metaphor of time people adopt. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that participants (...) who imagined a negative event were more likely to report that the event was approaching them, whereas those who imagined a positive event were more likely to report that they were approaching the event. Experiments 3a and 3b showed that participants judge an event to be more positive if it is described from the ego-moving perspective than if it is described from the time-moving perspective. Results from these studies provide initial evidence that positive and negative events are associated with different spatial metaphors of time. (shrink)