The superiority of up/down over left/right in metaphorical association with emotion

抄録

Positive valence links to one’s upside and dominant hand/side, whereas negative valence is associated with one’s downside and non-dominant hand/side (i.e., space-valence metaphor). Previous studies have indicated that the effect of the vertical-valence metaphor is more salient than that of horizontal-valence metaphor. Furthermore, this difference in saliency may be related to whether the experimental task is related to rapid reaction and reaction time (RT), which reflects processing fluency. The present study empirically examined these hypotheses by conducting RT (Experiment 1) and non-RT (Experiment 2) tasks (i.e., a detection task in which rapid reactions were required and a pointing task, respectively). We found that the effect of the vertical-valence metaphor occurred in the experiments, while the typical impact of the horizontal-valence metaphor was not found in either. Our findings suggest that the effect of the vertical-valence metaphor is salient, whereas the impact of the horizontal-valence metaphor is not robust. Moreover, this difference in saliency was independent of the type of experimental tasks.