The mechanism of valence-space metaphors: ERP evidence for affective word processing

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 9; no. 6; p. e99479
• Main Authors: Xie, Jiushu, Wang, Ruiming, Chang, Song
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 12.06.2014; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Affect - physiology; Behavior; Biology and Life Sciences; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cues; Discrimination; Discrimination (Psychology); Electrodes; Emotions; Enterprise resource planning; Event-related potentials; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Humans; Male; Memory; Metaphor; Psychology; Reaction Time - physiology; Semantics; Social Sciences; Spatial data; Studies; Task Performance and Analysis; Word processing; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0099479

Embodied cognition contends that the representation and processing of concepts involve perceptual, somatosensory, motoric, and other physical re-experiencing information. In this view, affective concepts are also grounded in physical information. For instance, people often say "feeling down" or "cheer up" in daily life. These phrases use spatial information to understand affective concepts. This process is referred to as valence-space metaphor. Valence-space metaphors refer to the employment of spatial information (lower/higher space) to elaborate affective concepts (negative/positive concepts). Previous studies have demonstrated that processing affective words affects performance on a spatial detection task. However, the mechanism(s) behind this effect remain unclear. In the current study, we hypothesized that processing affective words might produce spatial information. Consequently, spatial information would affect the following spatial cue detection/discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to remember an affective word. Then, they completed a spatial cue detection task while event-related potentials were recorded. The results indicated that the top cues induced enhanced amplitude of P200 component while participants kept positive words relative to negative words in mind. On the contrary, the bottom cues induced enhanced P200 amplitudes while participants kept negative words relative to positive words in mind. In Experiment 2, we conducted a behavioral experiment that employed a similar paradigm to Experiment 1, but used arrows instead of dots to test the attentional nature of the valence-space metaphor. We found a similar facilitation effect as found in Experiment 1. Positive words facilitated the discrimination of upper arrows, whereas negative words facilitated the discrimination of lower arrows. In summary, affective words might activate spatial information and cause participants to allocate their attention to corresponding locations. Valence-space metaphors might be grounded in attention allocation.