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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...

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Autores principales: Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando, Correa, Juan C., Sakarkar, Gopal, Ngo, Giang, Ruiz-Fernández, Susana, Butcher, Natalie, Yamada, Yuki
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486563/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27431389
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0787-9
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author Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando
Correa, Juan C.
Sakarkar, Gopal
Ngo, Giang
Ruiz-Fernández, Susana
Butcher, Natalie
Yamada, Yuki
author_facet Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando
Correa, Juan C.
Sakarkar, Gopal
Ngo, Giang
Ruiz-Fernández, Susana
Butcher, Natalie
Yamada, Yuki
author_sort Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-54865632017-07-17 Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando Correa, Juan C. Sakarkar, Gopal Ngo, Giang Ruiz-Fernández, Susana Butcher, Natalie Yamada, Yuki Psychol Res Original Article 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. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2016-07-18 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5486563/ /pubmed/27431389 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0787-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Original Article
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando
Correa, Juan C.
Sakarkar, Gopal
Ngo, Giang
Ruiz-Fernández, Susana
Butcher, Natalie
Yamada, Yuki
Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
title Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
title_full Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
title_fullStr Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
title_full_unstemmed Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
title_short Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
title_sort placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486563/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27431389
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0787-9
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