Discrepancy between emotion for space words and space for emotion words

Anisotropic mapping of emotional concepts into bodily space

Abstract

The body-specificity hypothesis predicts that emotional concepts are differently allocated on the bodily horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. The present study investigated whether the body-specific space-emotion association occurred in a conceptual realm, with comparisons of performances between vertical and horizontal planes. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the spatial words: "up", "down", "left", and "right". In Experiment 2, participants from two linguistic backgrounds were asked to allocate emotion words into a four-cell grid. Together, the results suggested a higher saliency of the space-emotion association in the vertical plane over the horizontal plane and a salient body-specificity in emotional evaluation for spatial concepts.