title: On the ups and downs of emotion: testing between conceptual-metaphor and polarity accounts of emotional valence-spatial location interactions.
abstract: In the past decade, many studies have focused on the relationship between emotional valence and vertical spatial positions from a processing perspective. Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) work on conceptual metaphor has traditionally motivated these investigations, but recent work (Lakens in J Exp Psychol: Learn, Mem Cogn, 38: 726-736, 2012) has suggested that polarity-based perspectives offer an alternative account of response time patterns. We contrasted the predictions of these two theories using a new facial emotion recognition task, in which participants made speeded responses to happy or sad faces on a display, with the spatial location of those faces being manipulated. In three experiments (two-alternative forced choice tasks and a go/no-go task), we found a pattern of responses consistent with a polarity-based account, but inconsistent with key predictions of the conceptual-metaphor account. Overall, congruency effects were observed for positively valenced items, but not for negatively valenced items. These findings demonstrate that polarity effects extend to nonlinguistic stimuli and beyond two-alternative forced choice tasks. We discuss the results in terms of common-coding approaches to task-response mappings.
authors.affiliation: Decision and Cognitive Sciences Research Centre, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK, d.lynott@lancaster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Dermot
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lynott
authors.forename: Kenny
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Coventry
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D019365:Metaphor; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
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