Emotion Review

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Conceptual Metaphors of Affect

L. Elizabeth Crawford
Emotion Review 2009; 1; 129
DOI: 10.1177/1754073908100438
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Emotion Review
Vol. 1, No. 2 (Apr. 2009) 129139
2009 SAGE Publications and
The International Society
for Research on Emotion
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073908100438
http://emr.sagepub.com

Conceptual Metaphors of Affect

L. Elizabeth Crawford
Department of Psychology, University of Richmond, USA

Abstract
Emotional experiences are often described in metaphoric language. A major question in linguistics and cognitive science is whether
such metaphoric linguistic expressions reflect a deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts structured by the embodied,
sensorimotor domains that we use to describe them? This review presents the argument for conceptual metaphors of affect and
summarizes recent findings from empirical studies. These findings show that, consistent with the conceptual metaphor account,
the associations between affect and physical domains such as spatial position, musical pitch, brightness, and size which are captured in linguistic metaphors also influence performance on attention, memory and judgment tasks. Despite this evidence, a number of concerns with metaphor as an account of affect representation are considered.

Keywords
affect, concept, linguistics, metaphor, representation

Happiness, health, status, and morality are not concrete physical

entities, but they are often described as if they were, using the
same terms that we use for temperature, vertical position, spatial
distance, and brightness. Such metaphors are not reserved for
poetry; they are ubiquitous in everyday speech and writing.
Metaphors have been estimated to occur during spoken discourse about once every 2530 words (Graesser, Mio, & Millis,
1989). A major question in linguistics and cognitive psychology
is whether such metaphorical linguistic expressions reflect a
deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts somehow
structured by the embodied, sensorimotor domains that we use
to describe them? That is, are the metaphors in language manifestations of mappings of mind to body through which we grasp
the world? How would we know?
Consistent with claims of metaphoric representation (Lakoff
& Johnson, 1980), there is a growing body of experimental work
demonstrating that the associations between abstract concepts
and the concrete domains used to characterize them influence
performance on a wide range of tasks. Much of this work has
examined metaphors of affect, a term which is used broadly here
to encompass emotions, moods, and immediate evaluative reactions to stimuli. One aim of this article is to review the current
findings showing that affect is mapped to physical dimensions
and that this has implications beyond figurative language use. I
examine how affective associations with brightness, vertical
position, distance, auditory pitch, and other dimensions influence

performance on tasks involving memory, evaluation, stimulus

discrimination, and shifts of attention. The findings presented
here lead to the conclusion that affect is tied to these physical
dimensions, and they provide some suggestive evidence that it
activates processing of these dimensions automatically.
A second aim of this review is to raise critical questions
about both the theory of metaphoric representation and the
empirical evidence used to support it. The research on
metaphors of affect has been inspired by Lakoff and Johnsons
(1980) account of conceptual metaphor, which argues that emotions are conceptualized in terms of concrete domains that are
grasped through bodily experience, such as space. Yet the growing body of research on embodiment of affect shows that emotions are themselves intrinsically embodied, which raises the
question of why they should be represented in terms of other
embodied dimensions. In addition, many of the empirical findings presented here are consistent with this account, but not
exclusively so, and they are considered in light of alternative
explanations.

Metaphoric Representation
Recent research in cognitive, affective, and neuro-science has
raised new questions about the nature of concepts. Influenced by
developments in logic and artificial intelligence, early cognitive

Author note: This work was supported by a grant from the University of Richmond Arts and Sciences Faculty Research Committee. I thank Matthew Crawford, Barbara Luka, Art
Glenberg, Paula Niedenthal and anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
Corresponding author: L. Elizabeth Crawford, Department of Psychology, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, USA. Email: lcrawfor@richmond.edu
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psychology characterized concepts as abstract, amodal representations, such as semantic networks or feature lists. As
Barsalou notes, such accounts were attractive because they
were able to model important conceptual functions, such as the
type-token distinction, categorical inference, productivity and
propositions (Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003,
p. 85). In addition, they could be formalized and implemented
in computer programs. Despite these advantages, such abstraction raises the important question of how such symbols are connected to their meanings. If concepts are amodal symbols, then
cognition is a closed loop of these symbols, with the meaning
of each defined only by other symbols. This problem is captured by Harnads (1990) Chinese dictionary thought experiment. In this reformulation of Searles (1980) Chinese room
problem, Harnad ponders how one can learn Chinese from only
a Chinese dictionary: any unknown character is defined only by
reference to other unknown characters, and the dictionary provides no way to connect these characters to anything outside of
the dictionary. Harnad calls this the symbol grounding problem.
Metaphoric representation is an approach to addressing the
symbol grounding problem. The general thrust of the theory, as
put forth by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is that there are few
concrete concepts that are learned through bodily experience
and which are understood directly, on their own terms.
Examples of such primary domains include spatial orientation and containment. Most other concepts are more abstract,
and through repeated pairings of experience with the concrete
domains, these come to be understood indirectly, in terms of
those original concrete concepts. Thus, abstract concepts are
represented in terms of our conceptualization of concrete, bodily experienced domains. Such representations are termed conceptual metaphors, distinguishing them from the linguistic
metaphors in which they find expression.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) posit that such metaphors are used
to conceptualize emotion. In their terminology, emotions are a
target domain and the more concrete domains used to represent
them are source domains, because they are the source of conceptual structure. (Elsewhere these are called the vehicle and
topic, e.g., Murphy, 1996.) Some conceptual metaphors are
very general and apply to almost all emotions. For instance, positive and negative emotions alike can be represented as fluid in a
container (She was filled with sadness. He was overflowing with
joy.) and as natural forces (She was swept off her feet. He was
engulfed by anger.). In contrast, other metaphors apply to some
emotions and not others. For example, the dimensions of light
dark and updown are used to represent sadness and happiness
but not anger, fear or love (Kvecses, 2000).
As Ortony (1975) notes, linguistic metaphors traditionally
are viewed as serving three purposes for communication: they
allow us to express ideas that would be difficult to express in literal terms; they provide a compact way of communicating a
complex array of information; and they convey our experience
in a rich, vivid way. For example, the metaphorical statement
Fear slowly crept up on him expresses a more complex set of
ideas than He slowly became afraid. In a compact and vivid
way, it implies a certain relationship between the fear and self,

namely, that the fear is a separate entity from the self that can
approach it in space. It also conveys that the self is, in some
sense, caught unawares; the fear is hidden and not under the
selfs control, it is predatory and deliberate in its intention.
Metaphors are used in discourse about any topic, but they
appear to be especially frequent when the topic is emotional,
and their frequency increases with emotional intensity (Ortony
& Fainsilber, 1989). We may use metaphoric language to
describe affective experience because our literal language is
inadequate. This mirrors the position of Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) that the ability to conceptualize emotions on their own
terms is inadequate, leading us to represent them in terms of
other, more concrete, dimensions of experience. According to
Lakoff and Johnson, emotions are abstract and difficult to conceptualize (see also Kvecses, 2000). When contrasting emotions with space, Lakoff and Johnson explain:
Although a sharply delineated conceptual structure for space emerges
from our perceptual-motor functioning, no sharply defined conceptual
structure for the emotions emerges from our emotional functioning
alone . . . [M]etaphors allow us to conceptualize our emotions in more
sharply defined terms. (1980, p. 58).

Thus, just as linguistic metaphors allow us to communicate

complex emotional ideas that we might not otherwise be able to
express, conceptual metaphors shape the way we understand the
emotions themselves.
Such metaphors are embodied in the sense that they depend
on the workings of the body and its relation to the physical
environment. Certain metaphors of affect and not others are
adopted because of the way affective experience correlates
with sensorimotor experience. For example, the experience of
happiness co-occurs with upright posture (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980), and this may be why we use UP but not DOWN to represent happiness. Similarly, the experience of anger produces
perceived increases in skin temperature, and this may be why
ANGER is more likely to be presented as HOT than COLD. Bodily
experience, including the bodys interactions with the physical
world, can constrain the range of possible metaphors for affective experience. Many such bodily experiences are universal,
such as our feelings of hunger or our experience of gravity,
which may give rise to many similarities in metaphoric expression across languages (Gibbs, 1994; Kvecses, 2000).
To explain what Lakoff and Johnson mean by conceptual
metaphor, it is important to clarify what they do not mean. First,
the theory of conceptual metaphor is not an account of the direct
experience of affect, but rather of its conceptualization. Lakoff and
Johnson do not claim that we come to understand space (or any
other source domain) before we have affective experience, and
they do not suggest that affective experience requires spatial representations. Instead, they argue that our concepts of affective
experience, which we use for reasoning and communicating, are
structured by our thinking about space and other domains that we
come to understand through direct sensorimotor experience. The
distinction between experience and conceptualization of affective
states is apparent in development: infants experience positive and
negative affect long before they can control the spatial orientation

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Crawford

of their bodies, but they learn to communicate about UP and DOWN

before they can communicate about HAPPY and SAD (Bloom, 2001;
Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler, & Ridgeway, 1986).
In addition, the conceptual metaphor account does not claim
simply that concrete dimensions are associated with more
abstract ones. Although such associations are necessarily implied
by the theory of conceptual metaphor, the account is more
focused (and controversial) than that. Rather, Lakoff and Johnson
argue that abstract concepts depend on representations of more
concrete ones, and cannot be conceptualized without them. We
can experience positive affect, but we cannot think about it without recruiting our concepts of space, brightness, or other physical
dimensions. A strong version of this account would go so far as
to claim that we have no concept of happiness that is independent of, and unstructured by, these source domains. In contrast, we
can think of concrete physical dimensions, such as space, without
invoking our concepts of happiness, because happiness does not
contribute to our conceptual structuring of space, which is understood directly. Thus, the links between the target domain of affect
and its source domains are inherently asymmetric.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) use the metaphoric expressions of
language to infer underlying conceptual metaphors and do not
provide evidence for these conceptual metaphors apart from language use. If linguistic metaphors reflect metaphorical conceptual structure, then this structure should be apparent in a variety
of cognitive processes. Concepts are the building blocks of cognition and any claim about their nature has implications not only
for language, but also memory, attention, and judgment.
Recently researchers have begun to apply the experimental
methods of cognitive psychology to examine these additional
implications of metaphoric representation. Much of this work
has focused on metaphors of affective experience.

Empirical Evidence
This review will focus primarily on affective metaphors which
use a continuous dimension as their source domain, such as
GOOD is UP. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) called these orientation
metaphors because the best example is spatial orientation, but
the more general term dimensional metaphors is used here in
order to include non-spatial dimensions such as brightness.
Such dimensional metaphors are thought to provide coherence
to systems of abstract concepts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) by
consistently mapping them to common physical dimensions.
For example, happiness, status, health and morality gain conceptual coherence because they are all mapped to the vertical
dimension of space. Although specific emotions often have
their own specific metaphors (e.g., anger is seeing red), the
experimental work on metaphoric representation of affect has
focused on mapping evaluative reactions to continuous dimensions such as vertical position, brightness, size and distance.

GOOD is UP
The vertical dimension of space is commonly used to describe
valenced states, as when HAPPINESS, POWER, STATUS and HEALTH

Conceptual Metaphors of Affect 131

are described as up and their negatively valenced opposites

are described as down. Thus we can say Im feeling up; Im at
the top of my game; Im at a low point; Ive hit bottom. As
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) note, such orientational metaphors
are systematic in two senses. First, they are internally systematic in that words related to up and down have consistent
meanings when applied to a state such as happiness. As a result
of this consistency, novel utterances such as My mood plummeted can be understood. Second, they are externally systematic in that the same orientation, UP, applies consistently to a
variety of positively valenced concepts. Here these are
addressed collectively as the GOOD is UP metaphor.
Of course, there are exceptions, and these are informative.
For example, power and status may be resented when they lead
to arrogance or a lack of sympathy for the concerns of common
folk. In those cases, the upward orientation may indicate status
while taking on a negative valence. For example, we might
praise someone for being down to earth or accuse someone of
acting uppity. The resulting tension between the evaluative
connotations of up and down was exploited for comedic effect
by the satirical newspaper The Onion in the article, National
Funk Congress Deadlocked on Get Up/Get Down Issue, which
described the bitter get up/get down battle over the direction in which the American people should shake it. (National
Funk Congress, 1999). While GOOD is UP is the prevailing
dimensional metaphor, reversals such as this highlight the flexibility of metaphoric conceptualization.
There are likely multiple sources for the association between
valenced concepts and verticality. In characterizing the development of this and other affective metaphors, Tolaas (1991) notes
that, for an infant all good things come from the all-powerful
parents, who approach from above. Thus throughout development, we may experience the correlation between positive affect
and the space above the self. In addition, it seems plausible that
the environment presents natural contingencies between valence
and verticality independent of our own location in space. For
instance, dead things lie on and are buried in the ground.
Furthermore, the association may be mapped to the experience
of our own bodies, as we are upright when healthy and prone
when sick, and, as any toddler knows, being upright affords
greater mobility and interaction. In addition, when sad, people
tend to hold a stooped posture in which the head tilts downward,
whereas happy people are more erect (LaFrance & Mayo, 1978).
The abstract concept of power may be thought of as UP because
physical power enables one literally to hold someone else down.
These various sources are not exclusive, and it seems likely that
the GOOD is UP dimensional metaphor is so pervasive because it
stems from many redundant and mutually reinforcing sources.
According to metaphoric representation, because of the
repeated pairing of affective experience with upward and downward locations, affect comes to be represented in terms of the vertical dimension of space (as well as other dimensions, as
described below). This account suggests that we cannot conceptualize affect without relying on spatial concepts. In a test of this
idea, Meier and Robinson (2004) used a reaction time paradigm
to assess whether evaluation activates metaphor-congruent spatial
locations. They presented valenced words in either the top or

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Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 2

bottom halves of a screen and had participants judge the valence

of each word as quickly as possible. Judgments were faster when
words appeared in metaphor congruent regions of space (positive
words on top and negative words on the bottom) than when they
appeared in metaphor incongruent regions. Additional experiments showed that evaluating centrally presented words facilitated subsequent shifts of attention to metaphor congruent
regions of space, suggesting that evaluative judgments primed
congruent spatial regions. In contrast, shifts of attention to
upward or downward locations did not affect subsequent evaluations. Meier and Robinson noted that this asymmetry of findings
is consistent with metaphoric representation accounts, which
claim that affect recruits spatial cognition, but not vice versa.
In a creative extension of this work, Meier and Hauser (2008)
showed that such congruence effects occur not only with respect
to the spatial position of the stimulus, but also with respect to the
spatial position of participants motoric response. When participants evaluated words by either pressing a key with a finger or
pressing a pedal with a foot, there was a similar congruence
effect, such that positive evaluations were faster when made with
the upper body than with the lower body, and vice versa for negative evaluations. In addition, it was found that participants
thought that tattoos with positive meaning should be placed
higher up on the body than tattoos with negative meaning.
Combined, these studies indicate that the association between
valence and verticality affects not only immediate shifts of spatial attention, but also expectations about the spatial position of
positive and negative items.
Additional work indicates that the association also affects
spatial memory. Crawford, Margolies, Drake, and Murphy
(2006) presented positive and negative images at various locations on a computer screen and had participants reproduce each
images location from memory. An important aspect of this
methodology is that the stimuli and response were both nonverbal, thus providing a test of the non-linguistic operation of
conceptual metaphor. They found that, whether memory was
tested immediately after each image was shown or after the
entire set had been presented, the valence of stimuli systematically biased spatial memory such that positive stimuli were
remembered as having appeared higher up in space than did
comparably located negative stimuli. In contrast, that study and
several other unpublished experiments found no evidence that
the location of stimuli affected how they were evaluated.
Crawford et al. argued that affectively charged stimuli activated
upper or lower regions of space, which were then integrated
with the memory for each stimuluss true location, causing that
memory to be biased toward metaphor congruent regions. In
contrast, they interpreted the null results as indicating that spatial position did not trigger affective responses, and thus did not
influence evaluations. Thus, consistent with Meier &
Robinsons (2004) findings, there was an asymmetric pattern of
results that is predicted by the view that space is used to represent affect but not vice versa.
The methodologies of Meier and Robinson (2004) and
Crawford et al. (2006) were combined to examine how vertical
space is used to represent the affectively charged concepts of the

divine. Meier and colleagues (Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen,

& Schjeldahl, 2007) note that Christian and non-Christian religions tend to locate God and heaven above and the devil and hell
below. They examined whether this association of divinity and
verticality affected performance on a variety of cognitive tasks.
Using a method based on the Implicit Association Test, they
found that people implicitly associate GOD with UP and THE DEVIL
with DOWN. They further found that locating GOD and DEVIL
words in metaphor congruent regions of space facilitated processing. In addition, they had participants reproduce the locations of GOD- and DEVIL-related words that had been presented at
various locations on the screen and found that spatial memory
for GOD-related words was biased upward while spatial memory
for DEVIL-related words was biased downward. Finally, they
found that participants judged strangers to be more likely to
believe in God if pictures of those strangers were located upper
as opposed to lower regions of space. Meier et al. concluded that
it may be impossible to conceptualize divinity without such perceptual metaphors.
Such metaphor effects can be driven not only by responses
to word and picture stimuli, but also by individual differences in
affective states. Meier and Robinson (2006) used a probe detection task to assess directional shifts of attention in people with
depressive symptoms and varying degrees of neuroticism,
which is associated with negative affect. They found that, compared to those low in neuroticism or depression, people who
were high in neuroticism or depression were faster to detect a
neutral spatial probe in the lower (versus higher) half of a display. The findings suggest that individuals experiencing greater
negative affect show a downward attentional bias.
The studies described above present compelling evidence
that GOOD is associated with UP, but they do not address the
question of where UP is, and this is not as obvious as it may
seem. Spatial locations can be defined with respect to multiple frames of reference, such as the frame defined by the
body (head is UP, feet are DOWN) and the frame defined by the
environment. Research participants are typically upright,
which aligns these reference frames and makes it unclear
which is being used to define vertical position. In order to
determine whether GOOD is associated with the bodys UP or
the environments UP, Meier, Wilson, Hauser, Gamble and
Taylor (2008) had participants lie on their sides, thus dissociating the two frames of reference. Words were presented in
four quadrants of a screen, which corresponded to locations
that were up in both environmental and bodily space, down in
both, or up in one frame but down in the other. Following the
paradigm of Meier and Robinson (2004, Experiment 1), participants evaluated each word as quickly as possible. The
results showed that participants were faster to evaluate words
that appeared in metaphor congruent locations with respect to
the body (GOOD toward the head, BAD toward the feet), but
there was no such effect with respect to the environmentally
defined coordinate system. This study provides initial evidence that GOOD is associated with the top of the body, even
if it is not upright, and not necessarily with the upper region
of external space.

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Crawford

In addition to bodily and environmentally defined UP, UP

may be defined by certain cultural conventions. For example, a
page of text lying flat on a table has a top and bottom, even
though in environmental and bodily space, these dimensions
actually map onto far and near, respectively. In an unpublished
study, Margolies & Crawford (2008b) tested memory for the
locations of valenced words on a computer screen that was
lying flat, in the horizontal plane. They found that spatial memory for positive items was biased toward the top of the screen
and for negative items it was biased toward the bottom of the
screen, even though top and bottom in this case were at the
same vertical position and might be better characterized as
away from and toward the self. In this case, UP may have been
defined by the conventional way a computer monitor is viewed.
Alternatively, given the downward angle at which participants
viewed the screen, UP may have been defined by the way the
screen mapped to the visual field.
Thus UP may be defined relative to the visual field, to the
body axis, to the environment, and by other conventions.
Because these typically coincide, they require unusual experimental manipulations to dissociate. Accounts of metaphoric
representation generally do not specify which UP is involved in
the representation of affect. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) note
that, UP is not understood purely in its own terms but emerges
from the collection of constantly performed motor functions
having to do with our erect position relative to the gravitational
field we live in. (p. 57). UP is understood as the interaction of
the body and environment.

GOOD is HIGH in Pitch

The spatial language of verticality is also used to describe pitches
of sound, which have affective connotations. High register tones
and tone intervals are judged to be more positive than are those in
a low register and music with higher pitches can be used to induce
a positive mood while music in a lower range can be used to
induce a negative mood (Gabrielsson & Lindstrm, 2001). The
description of sound in terms of vertical position is itself
metaphorical; high pitches are not spatially high. This is a common metaphor of pitch, but it is not universal. Zbikowski (1998)
notes that in Bali and Java, pitches are not high and low but
rather small and large, and that the Amazonian Suya describe
them as young and old. These metaphors may both stem from
the fact that children have higher pitched voices. Zbikowski speculates that the verticality metaphor of pitch may stem from the resonance of the human voice, as low sounds are felt lower in the
chest than are high sounds.
It is possible that labeling pitches as high and low leads them
to inherit positive and negative valence through application of
the GOOD is UP metaphor. However, there is also evidence that
the association between higher pitch and positive affect may
occur prelinguistically, as infants who are played ascending
tones tend to look longer at a happy face than a sad face
(Phillips, Wagner, Fells, & Lynch, 1990). Thus it seems likely
that high pitch is associated with positivity directly, that is,
independent of the spatial terms used to describe it. The sources

Conceptual Metaphors of Affect 133

of such an association are open to speculation. In keeping with

the Javanese and Balinese metaphors, this could reflect the high
pitched voices of children (although they also have high pitched
cries, a notoriously aversive sound) and perhaps that affectionate ways of speaking, such as infant-directed speech tend to
take on higher pitches (Ferguson, 1964).
The association between affect and pitch is coherent with the
association between affect and verticality, and has been shown
to have some similar effects. For instance, Weger, Meier,
Robinson, and Inhoff (2007) had participants judge the valence
of positive and negative words and then immediately after each
word, judge whether a presented tone was the higher or lower
of two choices. They found that participants were faster to recognize high tones after positive words than negative words, and
faster to recognize low tones after negative words than after
positive words. In a related study, Chandler and Crawford
(2008) presented high and low tones with valenced words and
found that the words were evaluated more quickly when they
appeared with a metaphorically congruent tone than with an
incongruent tone. These studies indicate that affective associations between pitch and verticality extend to the auditory
modality, in which tones are represented in terms of verticality.

GOOD is BIG (or MORE)

Especially in American culture, bigger is better. We describe
people who are petty or selfish as small. Words such as
grand and great can mean both large and good. This
metaphor is not as pervasive in language as is GOOD is UP, and
there are numerous exceptions. We are often reminded that
good things come in small packages, and smallness is valued in
many technological devices, but these are exceptions to the general rule. When we want to express that less is valuable, we can
use the expression Less is more, which is only sensible if we
understand MORE to mean GOOD.
The GOOD is BIG metaphor may be a reworking of the GOOD is
UP metaphor, as larger sizes or quantities often have greater vertical extent. It is well known that when children and adults judge
quantities, they rely on vertical extent more than horizontal
extent, and even expert bartenders will perceive the same
amount of a liquid to be less when it is poured into a short, wide
glass than when it is poured into a narrow tall glass (Wansink &
Van Ittersum, 2003). In associating GOOD with BIG, we may conflate size with verticality.
There is evidence that, even for abstract, meaningless stimuli, people use size to form preferences. Silvera, Josephs, and
Giesler (2002) showed that adults and three-year-olds prefer the
larger of two abstract stimuli when forced to choose. Meier,
Robinson, and Caven (2008) suggest that these findings might
reflect the metaphoric representation of affect. They examined
the impact of associations between GOOD and BIG on evaluations
of valenced words that were presented in small and large font
sizes. They found that positive words that were presented in a
large font were evaluated more quickly and accurately than
those that were presented in a small font, whereas the opposite
pattern held for negative words. They also showed that neutral

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words were evaluated more positively when they were shown in

a large font than when they were shown in a small font. Thus
the size of a words font, which is irrelevant to its meaning,
influenced peoples judgments of its valence.

GOOD is BRIGHT
In a televised interview days after the September 11th attacks,
Vice President Dick Cheney discussed the work of US intelligence agencies by saying, We have to work, sort of, the dark
side if you will. Weve got to spend time in the shadows.
( h t t p : / / w w w. w h i t e h o u s e . g o v / v i c e p r e s i d e n t / n e w s speeches/speeches/vp20010916.html). Cheney clearly intended to
convey the need for secrecy, but his metaphorical use of darkness
is especially chilling because it suggests secrecy of the most sinister kind. In the metaphorical use of light and dark, light indicates purity, morality, knowledge, transparency and happiness,
whereas dark indicates evil, ignorance, secrecy and sadness.
Such associations are thought to hold across all cultures (Adams
& Osgood, 1973), suggesting a universal source. This association may stem from humans dependence on vision, which
makes us more vulnerable in the darkness and fearful of it.
Furthermore, light generally comes from above, and thus may
inherit the positive affect associated with UP (Tolaas, 1991).
Whatever the original sources, this association is reinforced
powerfully through language and other cultural conventions.
The link between affect and brightness is so prevalent that
using brightness terms to evoke affect hardly seems metaphorical. We can take a dim view of someone and can be kept in the
dark. Dark moods can be treated with mood brighteners and we
can be told to look on the bright side. Although some of these
forms are conventionalized, a number of findings indicate that
the association between affect and brightness has implications
for behavior and perception. For example, in a study of professional hockey and football athletes, Frank and Gilovich (1988)
showed that those wearing black uniforms received more penalties than those wearing white uniforms. Additional laboratory
studies suggested that this difference occurred not only because
uniform color biases judgments about the players, but also
because it affects the players own behavior. Teams of participants who were assigned to wear black t-shirts chose more
aggressive game activities than did those assigned to wear white
t-shirts.
As Meier, Robinson, and Clore (2004) note, the metaphoric
representation account argues that processing in the abstract
domain of affect necessarily recruits perceptual processes, and
thus that the association between valence and brightness should
be obligatory. They examined this in a series of experiments that
presented positive and negative words in black or white font and
required participants to judge the valence of the words. They
found that words presented in metaphor-congruent font color
were evaluated more quickly and accurately than words presented in the opposite font color. In contrast, when participants
were shown the same stimuli and asked to judge whether the font
color was white or black, there was no impact of stimulus
valence. This asymmetry of findings mirrors that shown in their
work on GOOD is UP (Meier & Robinson, 2004). Meier et al.

conclude that people cannot conceptualize the affect of a stimulus

without considering its physical features (e.g., color). (2004, p. 86).
In a follow up to this study, Meier, Robinson, Crawford, and
Ahlvers (2007) examined whether stimulus valence influences
judgments about shades of gray. Participants evaluated positive
and negative words and then had to judge the shade of a gray
box by matching it to one of a set of boxes, which is a nonlinguistic response. The box was judged to be lighter when it
followed a positive evaluation than when it followed a negative
evaluation. In another experiment, they sought to determine if
the activation of metaphor-congruent color information was
automatic. After reading each valenced word, participants
judged whether a presented gray box was the lighter or darker
one of a previously learned set of two. Participants were required
to respond within 400 ms. The results showed that judgments
were biased toward metaphor congruent shades even though the
words were never explicitly evaluated and the responses were
rushed, suggesting that the activation of metaphor congruent
shades may be automatic.

GOOD is GETTING CLOSER

While we use the language of verticality to represent a wide
range of affective concepts, spatial distance terms are used in
a more limited way to represent the affectively charged
domains of relationships and goals. We speak of people as
being close to each other or distant, attached or separated.
Achieving goals is often described in terms of traversing
some distance to arrive at the goal state. Unlike verticality,
which is anchored at one end by the ground, spatial distance
has no inherent anchors and its endpoints must be defined for
it to be meaningful. Thus it makes sense to describe affective
states such as happiness by saying, Im feeling up, but not
by saying, Im feeling near. Spatial distance terminology
implies a relation between two entities and requires that we
specify, near to what?
Although spatial distance terms are less pervasive than other
dimensions in affective language, it is well known that affect is
strongly associated with approach and avoidance. Positive and
negative affect activate and are activated by the motoric behaviors that are typically used for pulling something closer or pushing it away (Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993; Chen &
Bargh, 1999). In addition, pulling toward rather than pushing
away facilitates retrieval of more positive items from memory
(e.g., Frster & Strack, 1997). These studies suggest that there
is an embodied correspondence between affect and sensorimotor behaviors, such that negative affect is associated with withdrawal and positivity is associated with approach toward a stimulus (Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert, 2003).
Recent findings show that our feelings about objects influence
judgments of the distance to those objects. Balcetis (2007) had
participants estimate distances to positively valenced objects,
such as chocolate, a $100 bill that participants could win, and
water when thirsty, as well as to negatively or neutrally valenced
objects, such as dog feces, someone elses $100 bill, and water
when not thirsty. Participants perceived the distances to desirable
objects as shorter than the distances to less desirable objects. This

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Crawford

same pattern of findings emerged whether they estimated the

distance in inches, by matching another distance to the one being
judged, or by throwing a bean bag at the object. Balcetis interprets these findings as evidence for motivated perception, but it is
worth noting that they are similar to some of the findings
reviewed here, such as those showing that stimulus valence
biased judgments of vertical position (Crawford et al., 2006).
The embodiment of affect in terms of approach and
avoidance may have implications for the spatial representation not only of affect itself, but also of other domains. In
particular, time is an abstract domain that tends to be
described in spatial terms, although it also has non-spatial
terminology (e.g., earlier, later). For English speakers,
time is represented using one of two spatial metaphors: egomoving or time-moving (Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002).
With the ego-moving metaphor, people see themselves as
actively moving through time from the present to the future
(e.g., We are approaching the deadline). With the timemoving metaphor, time plays the active role with respect to
the person (The deadline is approaching us). In order to
assess which spatial metaphor people are using to think
about time, Boroditsky and Ramscar asked them the following question: Next Wednesdays meeting has been moved
forward two days. What day is the meeting now that it has
been rescheduled? If people use the ego-moving metaphor,
then forward will be interpreted to mean further into the
future, and they will answer, Friday. If they use the timemoving metaphor, it will be interpreted to mean closer to the
present, and they will answer, Monday. Boroditsky and
Ramscar showed that people in different spatial situations
responded differently to this question, and furthermore, that
merely thinking about spatial experience influenced whether
they judged the meeting to be moved to Monday or Friday.
Margolies and Crawford (2008a) hypothesized that the
valence of an event might affect how space is used to conceptualize time. They assigned participants to imagine either a
positive or a negative future event and then to answer questions about the event. In several experiments using hundreds
of participants, they found no evidence that the valence of the
imagined event affected whether it was judged to be moved to
Friday (i.e., ego-moving perspective) or Monday (i.e., time
moving perspective). However, when explicitly asked
whether they felt they were approaching the event or the
event was approaching them, those who imagined a positive
event were more likely to judge that they were approaching,
and less likely to judge that the event was approaching, than
were those who imagined a negative event. In another experiment, participants read about a neutral event that was
described using the ego-moving metaphor or time-moving
metaphor and then evaluated how a target character felt about
the event. Events presented with ego-moving language were
judged to be more positive than were events presented with
time-moving language. Margolies and Crawford concluded
that the two spatial metaphors of time conveyed different
affective information, and that affective states may provide a
spatial context for thinking about time.

Conceptual Metaphors of Affect 135

Metaphoric Representation or Associations?

To support their claim that emotions are represented via conceptual metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) use evidence
that is almost exclusively linguistic. They list numerous examples of linguistic metaphor expressions and highlight the ways in
which these expressions are systematic, suggesting that they
cluster around a core set of conceptual metaphors. They also
demonstrate that these conceptual metaphors support new entailments. For example, a statement such as, My opinion of him
fell once I heard the rumors, may be novel, but it is sensible by
virtue of the conceptual metaphor GOOD is UP. However, their
reliance on linguistic expressions to support the argument poses
a circularity problem: conceptual metaphors are inferred from
linguistic expressions, which are used as evidence for conceptual metaphors. If, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest, linguistic
metaphors are a manifestation of underlying conceptual
metaphors, then those conceptual metaphors should affect not
only language use but a variety of other cognitive operations as
well. The research reviewed here begins to address this problem.
It finds evidence that the links between source and target
domains that are expressed in linguistic metaphors also influence attention, judgment and memory. Importantly, such links
are evident even on non-linguistic tasks such as spatial memory
of picture stimuli (Crawford et al., 2006).
While the findings reviewed here have been interpreted as
evidence for the theory of metaphoric representation, they may
not address its fundamental claim: that representations of target
domains are structured by representations of source domains. A
conservative interpretation of these findings would be that they
provide evidence for associations between source and target
domains. These associations may be learned from correlations in
our affective experience and may then be reflected in both language and thought. For example, positive affect may co-occur
with objects that are in higher spatial or with more upright posture, giving rise to learned associations as well as linguistic
metaphors. Conceptual metaphor theory posits such correlations
as a source of conceptual metaphors, however, it also claims that
the physical dimensions are necessary to fully conceptualize the
more abstract domain of affect. An associationist interpretation
of the findings reviewed here assumes that affective concepts
exist independent of the physical domains used to describe them
and are not, in fact, structured by those domains. Our use of
metaphoric language may reflect such associations without necessarily implying that underlying conceptual metaphors determine how affect is conceptualized. For example, using spatial
language to describe both space and affect might be a form of
polysemy rather than true metaphor (e.g., Murphy, 1996).
Do the asymmetric patterns of findings described above
constitute strong evidence for metaphoric representation?
Metaphoric representation specifically predicts that the relationship between source and target domains is asymmetric.
That is, thinking about the target domain will necessarily
involve representations of the source domain and not vice
versa. Happiness must evoke UP but UP does not necessarily
evoke happiness. Indeed, some of the findings reviewed here

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show this asymmetry. For example, Meier and Robinson

(2004) found that evaluating positive and negative words facilitated shifts of attention to metaphor-congruent spatial regions,
whereas shifts of attention to those regions did not facilitate
evaluation. In addition, Crawford et al. (2006) showed that
evaluations of valenced images were not biased by the images
locations, suggesting that space did not influence affect. In
contrast, memory for image locations was biased by the
valence of the images, presumably because the affectively
charged content of images activated spatial regions which then
affected spatial memory.
There are several reasons why we should be cautious about
interpreting these asymmetric findings as strong evidence for
metaphoric representation. First, some asymmetry may stem
from asymmetries of measurement. For example, Crawford
et al. (2006) measured spatial memory errors in the continuous
dimension of space using units of pixels on a computer screen,
but they measured evaluation using a seven-point Likert scale,
which may not be sensitive enough to show subtle biasing
effects. In addition, there may be asymmetries of processing.
For instance, in Meier and Robinsons (2004) work, evaluations
primed space but not vice versa, but participants also took
longer to do the evaluative version of the task than to do the spatial version. If the evaluative task was more difficult, this might
wash out any subtle effect of spatial priming, thus producing the
observed asymmetric pattern of results.
Another concern that can be raised with respect to the unidirectionality hypothesis is that not all of the findings show this
asymmetry. For instance, in case of the BIGGER is BETTER conceptual metaphor, we might predict that positive things would be
judged to be larger and negative things to be smaller because
evaluating things as positive and negative would activate these
size concepts. In keeping with the asymmetric findings of other
studies, we might also predict that larger and smaller sizes would
not necessarily influence evaluations, just as high and low locations did not appear to influence evaluations. However, Meier
et al. (2008) show that font size influences evaluations (they did
not test whether evaluation affected size judgments). Thus the
asymmetry that is sometimes taken to be evidence of conceptual
metaphor does not appear consistently across studies.
Finally, it should be noted that there are theoretical accounts
other than conceptual metaphor that can handle such unidirectional findings. An associationist account could account for the
asymmetric results. For example, if space and valence are associated with each other but space is also associated with many
other domains, then interference from those domains might lead
valence to activate space to a greater degree than space activates
valence. In addition, Tverskys (1977) contrast model is a classic example of disembodied cognitive model which represents
objects as lists of features. Tversky showed how a feature matching process that takes into account common and distinctive features predicts asymmetric similarity judgments and patterns of
confusion. In general, less salient items are judged as more similar to, and are more likely to be confused with, more prominent
items than vice versa. In the social domain, Holyoak and
Gordons (1983) work on the reference point model showed that

other people are judged more similar to the self than the self is
to those others. While the asymmetric findings reviewed here are
consistent with metaphoric representation, there are nonmetaphoric processes that could give rise to such asymmetries.

Why Represent Affective States

Metaphorically?
Affective states may be understood metaphorically for many of
the same reasons that they are communicated metaphorically.
Ortony and Fainsilber (1989) suggest that our non-metaphorical
language is not adequate for capturing the experience of emotions, especially intense ones. They conclude that metaphorical
language may make it possible for people to convey what would
otherwise be difficult or impossible to express (p. 181). The difficulty of expressing affective experience in literal language may
reflect the difficulty of conceptualizing it. As noted above,
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that emotions are represented
metaphorically because they are abstract and not clearly defined
in their own terms. Although this account has intuitive appeal, it
leaves open several questions which need to be resolved if conceptual metaphor is to continue to be a useful construct in cognitive and affective science.
The first question is one of clarification and precision: In
what sense is affect more abstract, less primary, and harder to
conceptualize than physical domains? Lakoff and Johnson
(1999) emphasize embodiment and the role of sensorimotor
experience in the source domains used to represent affective
states, but this distinction between subjective and sensorimotor
experience glosses over the fact that affect involves both; it is a
target domain that is itself embodied. Affective experience correlates with physiological responses that prepare the body for
flight or fight, with contractions of muscles of the face that produce emotional expressions, and with contractions of arm muscles that move wanted or unwanted objects toward or away
from the self (reviewed in Barsalou, Niedenthal et al., 2003).
Given that affect has its own sensorimotor correlates, why rely
on the sensorimotor representations of other domains?
In addition, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) stress that the concrete, physical domains are effective for representation
because they are more sharply delineated than emotion, but
this claim warrants further examination. In some ways, our
cognition about affect seems to be on firmer ground than our
cognition about its source domains, such as space. For example, people are remarkably good at remembering the affective
tone of their experiences, even when many details of those
experiences have been forgotten. In addition, perception of
location, brightness and size is subject to a variety of biases
and context effects which suggests that these may not be such
a stable foundation for grounding affect. Indeed, Crawford et
al.s (2006) finding that stimulus valence affects spatial memory but spatial locations do not affect evaluations might be
taken to indicate that affective responses to stimuli are less
malleable and more stable than the coding of their spatial
locations.

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Crawford

Given the qualitative difference between affect and the

physical domains used to describe it, to order them in terms of
which is more or less abstract, primary, or sharply delineated,
is to over-simplify. A more promising approach might be to
consider what advantages these source domains offer the representation of affect. Affect may capitalize on source domains
such as space and brightness because they provide powerful
ways to represent and manipulate information for the self and
for others (see Gattis, 2001). Spatial cognition in particular is
often recruited to support reasoning about non-spatial information, as demonstrated by mnemonic devices such as the Method
of Loci and the effectiveness of graphs and diagrams. Many
authors have noted that transitive inference problems are simplified when represented spatially because spatial relations (left
of, above) necessarily and inherently preserve transitivity (e.g.,
Huttenlocher, 1968). In addition, spatial representations such as
Venn or Euler diagrams can be recruited to solve syllogisms
(Johnson-Laird, 1972). Work by Goldin-Meadow and colleagues (Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner, 2001)
shows that gesturing during problem solving can decrease
working memory load, perhaps because it shifts some of the
cognitive load from verbal to spatial working memory.
Using space and other dimensions to represent affect might
be akin to symbolic off-loading (Wilson, 2002) which, as in
diagramming or graphing, exploits external space to save cognitive work. Rather than representing affect externally, or offloading it from the cognitive system, metaphoric representation
shifts it within the cognitive system, recruiting visual cognition
to support reasoning about affective experience. In addition to
the cognitive benefits such a strategy may afford, communication and empathy may be enhanced by using shared, objectively
observable domains to represent the private, internal experience
of emotion. Thus we may think of affect in terms of other physical dimensions not because affect is abstract or poorly delineated and has no clear representation of its own, but because
doing so allows us to exploit advantages that these dimensions
have for reasoning and communicating.

Metaphoric Representation, Simulation,

and Embodiment
Lakoff and Johnsons development of conceptual metaphor theory has influenced a variety of fields ranging from linguistics to
politics (e.g., Lakoff, 2004). Within the cognitive sciences, it
helped to spark a fundamental change in how we understand
concepts. Whereas earlier cognitive science modeled concepts
as abstract, disembodied symbols that bare no trace of the perceptual, motoric and emotional experiences they refer to, the
emerging field of embodied or situated cognition views
them as grounded in sensorimotor and affective experience.
Much of the current work on the embodiment of concepts
concerns not metaphor but rather simulation. For example,
Barsalous Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (1999)
posits that conceptual processing is based on simulations which
consist of partial reenactments involving the same neurological
substrates used during online experience.

Conceptual Metaphors of Affect 137

There is growing evidence that such simulations underlie

language comprehension (e.g., Zwaan & Yaxley, 2003). In the
domain of emotion, Havas, Glenberg, and Rinck (2007)
presented intriguing evidence that understanding emotional
language involves simulating the motoric components of the
relevant emotion. Using the manipulation developed by Strack,
Martin, and Stepper (1988), they had participants hold a pen in
the mouth in such a way as to activate the same facial muscles
used either for smiling or frowning without participants realizing that their faces were making these affective expressions.
While keeping this facial posture, participants read valenced
sentences and then judged whether they were easy or hard to
understand. For the sentences that were easily understood,
these judgments were faster when the facial expression was
congruent with the valence in the sentence. Interestingly, an
additional experiment showed that the pen manipulation did
not affect performance on a lexical decision task involving
valenced words. These results suggest that emotions are simulated during comprehension of sentences, but not during the
immediate lexical access of individual words.
Integrating work on simulation with metaphoric representation will be an important direction for future research, and recent
theoretical work has begun to synthesize these accounts. For
instance, Ritchie (2008) suggests that metaphors activate partial
perceptual simulations like those posited by Barsalou. Similarly,
Gibbs (2006) argues that some metaphors are interpreted by running an imagined bodily simulation of the activities described in
the metaphor (e.g., grasping a concept). Although much of the
work on simulation has focused on comprehension of literal language, it seems plausible that the same processes would underlie comprehension of figurative language, such as metaphors.
Simulation theories and metaphoric representation converge
on the notion of embodiment from different directions. Conceptual metaphor theory starts with findings from metaphoric language and draws inferences about representation, arguing that we
use knowledge of the body to structure abstract concepts, making
them more cognitively tractable. Simulation theories such as PSS
start with the notion of simulations as a unifying computational
principle across diverse processes in the brain (Barsalou, 2008,
p. 622) and show their impact on a variety of cognitive operations,
including language comprehension. Given the broad scope of
simulation accounts, they may come to subsume conceptual
metaphor theory. Indeed, the findings reviewed here might reflect
simulations involving perceptual experience of space, brightness,
distance, and size. The conceptual metaphors such as those presented by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) may be a special case of simulation, one that focuses on those aspects of embodied emotion that
come to be captured in figurative language. At the core of both simulation and conceptual metaphor accounts are the associations
between affective and bodily states, and it is these associations that
are reflected in the findings reviewed here.

Conclusion
Affective experience is foundational to social life, and yet it
seems nearly impossible to communicate about it in its own

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terms. Instead, we render it in terms of physical dimensions

which are external and objectively observable, such as spatial
position, brightness, auditory pitch, and size. The influential
work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggested that linguistic
metaphors of affect, such as GOOD is UP, reflect the deeper principle of conceptual metaphor, according to which abstract concepts are conceptualized in terms of more concrete, embodied
physical domains. In support of this view, there is a growing
body of research showing that affect influences a variety of cognitive processes including shifts of attention, spatial memory,
and judgments of brightness, and that it does so in a manner that
is consistent with conceptual metaphor theory.
This paper summarized the current evidence for conceptual
metaphors of affect while also raising critical questions about
conceptual metaphor theory. The findings reviewed here are
consistent with conceptual metaphor theory, but not exclusively
so, and I consider them in light of alternative accounts. In light
of the research reviewed in this special issue on the embodiment
of emotion, I question Lakoff and Johnsons characterization of
emotion as abstract or poorly delineated. I suggest that representing affect in terms of physical dimensions may be beneficial
because it allows us to recruit visual spatial cognition to support
reasoning and communication about affective experience.

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