The Vertical-spatial Metaphor Of Emotions In Text Reading Comprehension

“Metaphors we live by”which is written by Lakoff and Johnson puts forwardthat metaphors exist generally in daily life, covering language, thought and behavior,almost everywhere. They consider that spatial metaphor is the most important andbasic cognitive domain in all the metaphors. The vertical-spatial metaphor is acognitive style which is mapping from up-down spatial orientation concept to othercognitive domains. In this paper, two experiments were conducted to investigate thepsychological reality of the vertical-spatial metaphor of emotions which is "happy isup, sad is down" in text reading.In experiment1,25participants are assigned to read an emotional discoursepresenting sentence by sentence at first, and then to react to the letter "F" or "J"presenting above or below the screen. The purpose of the experiment is to explorewhether reding different emotional discourse would produce vertical-spatial metaphoror not. The results show that subjects react quickly to the object which present abovethe spatial location while reading positive emotional discourse, and react quickly tothe object which present in the bottom of the spatial location while reading negativeemotional discourse. In other words, there is a mapping from the source domain to thetarget domain of the vertical-spatial metaphor of emotions in text.In experiment2,21participants read text containing a spatial displacement atfirst, and then judge the gender of the emotional picture presenting in the middle ofthe screen by unrelated task paradigm. The purpose of the experiment is to explorewhether reading different discourses containing different spatial displacementswould affect responses to different emotional pictures of subjects or not. The resultsshowed that the reaction time of subjects to positive emotions or negative emotionspictures presenting in the middle of the screen after reading discourse containingmoving up or moving down in space was no significant difference.The method of experiment3is similar to experiment2, excepting for picturespresenting in the top or the bottom of the screen at random. Because the presentinglocations of the emotional pictures are random, the effect of its presenting position to the results of the experiment has been balanced, and we need not consider of theeffect of it. The results show that the spatial factors affect the reactions to emotionalpictures. That is, subjects response fast to positive emotional pictures while readingdiscourse containing moving up in space, and response fast to negative emotionalpictures while reading discourse containing moving down in space. In other words,there is a mapping from the target domain to the source domain of vertical-spatialmetaphor of emotions in text.This study reveals that the vertical-spatial metaphor of emotions exist in discoursecontext, and there is a bidirectional mapping between space, the original domain, andmood, the target domain in nature.