Contrasting vertical and horizontal representations of affect in emotional visual search

Feeling up or feeling down: Verticality preferences in personality, pathology, and well-being

Theories of mental functioning have suggested its metaphoric basis. Drawing from theories of this type as well as from recent extensions of such theories to the personality processing realm, participants in three studies (total N = 452) were asked to indicate their relative preferences for the spatial concepts of up versus down, given that verticality metaphors are frequently used to conceptualize states related to emotion and well-being. Up-preferring individuals were more extraverted and approach-motivated (Study 1), whereas down-preferring individuals were more depressed (Studies 1 and 2). Higher levels of vertical preference were also predictive of affective well-being in a daily diary protocol (Study 3) and these relationships operated in both between-person and within-person terms. Metaphors, which liken the intangible to the tangible, may play a significant role in shaping experience and verticality metaphors, in particular, appear to provide insights into the processes that that support happiness versus its absence.

Happiness feels light and sadness feels heavy: introducing valence-related bodily sensation maps of emotions

Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) is a recently developed self-report tool for the assessment of emotions in which people draw their sensations of activation in a body silhouette. Following the circumplex model of affect, activity and valence are the underling dimensions of every emotional experience. The aim of this study was to introduce the neglected valence dimension in BSM. We found that participants systematically report valence-related sensations of bodily lightness for positive emotions (happiness, love, pride), and sensations of bodily heaviness in response to negative emotions (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, depression) with specific body topography (Experiment 1). Further experiments showed that both computers (using a machine learning approach) and humans recognize emotions better when classification is based on the combined activity- and valence-related BSMs compared to either type of BSM alone (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that both types of bodily sensations reflect distinct parts of emotion knowledge. Importantly, participants found it clearer to indicate their bodily sensations induced by sadness and depression in terms of bodily weight than bodily activity (Experiment 2 and 4), suggesting that the added value of valence-related BSMs is particularly relevant for the assessment of emotions at the negative end of the valence spectrum.

Negation as conflict: Conflict adaptation following negating vertical spatial words

In this study, we investigated whether the processing of negated directional terms such as "not up" or "not down" poses a conflict for participants and results in similar processing adjustments as non-linguistic conflicts do (Dudschig & Kaup, 2019). In each trial, participants read one of the following four phrases "now up", "not up", "now down" or "not down" and responded with a button press on a response key mounted in the upper versus lower vertical space. Behavioral data indicated that processing negated phrases leads to considerable processing difficulties for participants even after extensive practice. Interestingly, in line with standard conflict adaptation effects reported in the Simon, the Flanker and the Stroop task, negation processing was facilitated when preceded by another high conflict trial (i.e. a negated trial) as compared to a low conflict trial (i.e. an affirmative phrase). In addition, electrophysiological data showed that in negated trials first the to-be-negated information was activated (i.e., up in the case of "not up") and only in a second step, the outcome of the negation process was represented (i.e. down). In line with behavioral data, electrophysiological data was modified by trial sequence, suggesting negation triggering standard conflict adaptation patterns. Taken together, conflict-related processing adjustments can be also observed if the conflict is triggered by linguistic negation of vertical directional words. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Why Smoggy Days Suppress Our Mood: Automatic Association Between Clarity and Valence

The intuition of clarity-valence association seems to be pervasive in daily life, however, whether there exists a potential association between clarity (i.e., operationalized as visual resolution) and affect in human cognition remains unknown. The present study conducted five experiments, and demonstrated the clarity-valence congruency effect, that is, the evaluations showed performance advantage in the congruent conditions (clear-positive, blurry-negative). Experiments 1 through 3 demonstrated the influence of the perception of clarity on the conceptualization of affective valence, while Experiments 4 and 5 verified the absence of the influence of conceptualization on perception, thus the unidirectionality of clarity-valence association in cognition is confirmed. The findings extend the affective perceptual-conceptual associations into the dimension of clarity, thus providing support for the ideas of embodied cognition as well as implications for our preference for clarity and aversion to blur.

Emotional Semantic Congruency based on stimulus driven comparative judgements

A common cognitive process in everyday life consists in the comparative judgements of emotions given a pair of facial expressions and the choice of the most positive/negative among them. Results from three experiments on complete-facial expressions (happy/angry) and mixed-facial expressions (neutral/happy-or-angry) pairs viewed with (Experiment 1 and 3) or without (Experiment 2) foveation and performed in conditions in which valence was either task relevant (Experiment 1 and 2) or task irrelevant (Experiment 3), show that comparative judgements of emotions are stimulus driven. Judgements' speed increased as the target absolute emotion intensity grew larger together with the average emotion of the pair, irrespective of the compatibility between the valence and the side of motor response: a semantic congruency effect in the domain of emotion. This result undermines previous interpretation of results in the context of comparative judgements based on the lateralization of emotions (e.g., SNARC-like instructional flexibility), and is fully consistent with our formalization of emotional semantic congruency: the direct Speed-Intensity Association model.

Placing Abstract Concepts in Space: Quantity, Time and Emotional Valence

Research has shown that abstract concepts are often conceptualized along horizontal and vertical axes. However, there are mixed results concerning which axis is preferred for which type of conceptual domain. For instance, it has been suggested that the vertical axis may be preferred for quantity in tasks using linguistic stimuli (e.g., ‘more,’ ‘less’), whereas numerals (e.g., ‘1,’ ‘2,’ ‘3’) may be more prone to horizontal conceptualization. In this study, we used a task with free response options to see where participants would place quantity words (‘most,’ ‘more,’ ‘less,’ ‘least’), numerals (‘2,’ ‘4,’ ‘7,’ ‘9’), time words (‘past,’ ‘future,’ ‘earliest,’ ‘earlier,’ ‘later,’ ‘latest’) and emotional valence words (‘best,’ ‘better,’ ‘worse,’ ‘worst’). We find that for quantity words, the vertical axis was preferred; whereas for numerals, participants preferred the horizontal axis. For time concepts, participants preferred the horizontal axis; and for emotional valence, they preferred the vertical axis. Across all tasks, participants tended to use specific axes (horizontal, vertical), rather than combining these two axes in diagonal responses. These results shed light on the spatial nature of abstract thought.

Metaphorical Action Retrospectively but Not Prospectively Alters Emotional Judgment

Metaphorical association between vertical space and emotional valence is activated by bodily movement toward the corresponding space. Upward or downward manual movement "following" observation of emotional images is reported to alter the perceived valence as more positive or negative. This study aimed to clarify this retrospective emotional modulation. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of temporal order of emotional stimuli and manual movements. Participants performed upward, downward, or horizontal manual movements immediately before or after observation of emotional images; they then rated the valence of the image. The images were rated as more negative in downward- than in horizontal-movement conditions only when the movements followed the image observation. Upward movement showed no effect. Experiment 2 examined the effects of temporal proximity between images, movements, and ratings. The results showed that a 2-s interval either between image and movement or movement and rating nullified the retrospective effect. Bodily movement that corresponds to space-valence metaphor retrospectively, but not prospectively, alters the perceived valence of emotional stimuli. This effect requires temporal proximity between emotional stimulus, the subsequent movement, and rating of the stimulus. With respect to the lack of effect of upward-positive correspondence, anisotropy in effects of movement direction is discussed.

Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence-Space Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up-bad is down and good is right-bad is left). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants' hands while responding to the task-regardless of the location of their dominant hand-facilitates the judgment of positive and negative-valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor-congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.

Is the sunny side up and the dark side down? Effects of stimulus type and valence on a spatial detection task

In verbal communication, affective information is commonly conveyed to others through spatial terms (e.g. in "I am feeling down", negative affect is associated with a lower spatial location). This study used a target location discrimination task with neutral, positive and negative stimuli (words, facial expressions, and vocalizations) to test the automaticity of the emotion-space association, both in the vertical and horizontal spatial axes. The effects of stimulus type on emotion-space representations were also probed. A congruency effect (reflected in reaction times) was observed in the vertical axis: detection of upper targets preceded by positive stimuli was faster. This effect occurred for all stimulus types, indicating that the emotion-space association is not dependent on sensory modality and on the verbal content of affective stimuli.

Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study

The valence–space metaphor posits that emotion concepts map onto vertical space such that positive concepts are in upper locations and negative in lower locations. Whilst previous studies have demonstrated this pattern for positive and negative emotions e.g. ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’, the spatial location of neutral emotions, e.g. ‘surprise’, has not been investigated, and little is known about the effect of linguistic background. In this study, we first characterised the emotions joy, surprise and sadness via ratings of their concreteness, imageability, context availability and valence before examining the allocation of these emotions in vertical space. Participants from six linguistic groups completed either a rating task used to characterise the emotions or a word allocation task to implicitly assess where these emotions are positioned in vertical space. Our findings suggest that, across languages, gender, handedness, and ages, positive emotions are located in upper spatial locations and negative emotions in lower spatial locations. In addition, we found that the neutral emotional valence of surprise is reflected in this emotion being mapped mid-way between upper and lower locations onto the vertical plane. This novel finding indicates that the location of a concept on the vertical plane mimics the concept’s degree of emotional valence.

Valence activates motor fluency simulation and biases perceptual judgment

The concept of motor fluency, defined as the positive marking associated with the easy realisation of a movement, is used to explain the various compatibility effects observed between emotional valence and lateral space. In this work, we propose that these effects arise from the motor fluency simulation induced by emotionally positive stimuli. In a perceptual line bisection task (Landmark task) we primed each trial with an emotionally positive word, negative word, neutral word or no word before asking participants to verbally indicate the side of the vertical mark on the horizontal line (Experiment 1) or to indicate the longest side of the line (Experiment 2). After positive words and for bisected lines, participants' responses were biased towards their dominant side for both right- and left-handers and similarly under the two different instructions. As movements of the dominant hand or in the dominant hemispace have been described as the most fluent lateral actions, this result supports our hypothesis that positive stimuli induce a mental simulation of fluent lateral movements. Furthermore, the replication of the effect under opposite instructions between the two experiments is in line with an explanation in terms of a bias in response selection rather than variations in perceptual content.

Cross-modal metaphorical mapping of spoken emotion words onto vertical space

From the field of embodied cognition, previous studies have reported evidence of metaphorical mapping of emotion concepts onto a vertical spatial axis. Most of the work on this topic has used visual words as the typical experimental stimuli. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined the association between affect and vertical space using a cross-modal procedure. The current research is a first step toward the study of the metaphorical mapping of emotions onto vertical space by means of an auditory to visual cross-modal paradigm. In the present study, we examined whether auditory words with an emotional valence can interact with the vertical visual space according to a 'positive-up/negative-down' embodied metaphor. The general method consisted in the presentation of a spoken word denoting a positive/negative emotion prior to the spatial localization of a visual target in an upper or lower position. In Experiment 1, the spoken words were passively heard by the participants and no reliable interaction between emotion concepts and bodily simulated space was found. In contrast, Experiment 2 required more active listening of the auditory stimuli. A metaphorical mapping of affect and space was evident but limited to the participants engaged in an emotion-focused task. Our results suggest that the association of affective valence and vertical space is not activated automatically during speech processing since an explicit semantic and/or emotional evaluation of the emotionally valenced stimuli was necessary to obtain an embodied effect. The results are discussed within the framework of the embodiment hypothesis.