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The activation of representative emotional verbal contexts interacts with vertical spatial axis

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Abstract

Several experimental studies have shown that there exists an association between emotion words and the vertical spatial axis. However, the specific conditions under which this conceptual–physical interaction emerges are still unknown, and no study has been devised to test whether longer linguistic units than words can lead to a mapping of emotions on vertical space. In Experiment 1, Spanish and Colombian participants performed a representative verbal emotional contexts production task (RVEC task) requiring participants to produce RVEC for the emotions of joy, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust. The results showed gender and cultural differences regarding the average number of RVEC produced. The most representative contexts of joy and sadness obtained in Experiment 1 were used in Experiment 2 in a novel spatial–emotional congruency verification task (SECV task). After reading a sentence, the participants had to judge whether a probe word, displayed in either a high or low position on the screen, was congruent or incongruent with the previous sentence. The question was whether the emotion induced by the sentence could modulate the responses to the probes as a function of their position in a vertical axis by means of a metaphorical conceptual–spatial association. Overall, the results indicate that a mapping of emotions on vertical space can occur for linguistic units larger than words, but only when the task demands an explicit affective evaluation of the target.

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Notes

  1. In the study reported herein, the focus is only on the number of verbal contexts since potential qualitative differences require different analyses that exceed the limits of this paper.

  2. Figure 2A might suggest that while there was a significant difference between males and women in the Colombian sample, this was not the case in the Spanish sample. Welch pairwise tests showed that those differences were significant in both cases [t(61.09) = 4.96, p < .001 (Colombiamale vs. females) and t(66.75) = 2.84, p = .005 (Spain male vs. females)], thus confirming our second hypothesis, i.e. women produce more RVEC than men. Additionally, a Welch pairwise test showed that there was no significant difference between Colombian and Spanish males t(48.08) = 1.44, p = .15) in Fig. 2a.

  3. We thank one of reviewers for suggesting this analysis.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Juan Botella (Autónoma University, Madrid) and Antonio Rodán (CEU University, Madrid) for providing facilities to take data for Experiment 1, Carlos Elias Cifuentes Villalobos (Los Libertadores University) for assisting with part of the analyses for Experiment 1, and Dr. Robyn Groves for assisting with proofreading this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia

    Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos

  2. National University of Distance Education (UNED), Madrid, Spain

    Pedro R. Montoro, María Rosa Elosúa & María José Contreras

  3. University of Boyacá, Tunja, Colombia

    William Alejandro Jiménez-Jiménez

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  1. Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
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  2. Pedro R. Montoro
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  3. María Rosa Elosúa
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  4. María José Contreras
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  5. William Alejandro Jiménez-Jiménez
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Correspondence to Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos.

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This article is part of the Special Section on “Embodied Social Cognition”, guest-edited by Fernando Marmolejo Ramos and Amedeo Dangiulli.

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Marmolejo-Ramos, F., Montoro, P.R., Elosúa, M.R. et al. The activation of representative emotional verbal contexts interacts with vertical spatial axis. Cogn Process 15, 253–267 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-014-0620-6

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