SPATIAL COGNITION
Several experimental studies have shown that there exists an association between emotion words and the vertical spatial axis. However, the specific conditions under which this conceptual–physical interaction emerges are still unknown, and, to date, no study has been devised to test whether linguistic units longer than words can lead to mapping emotions on the vertical space.
We have used a novel spatial–emotional congruency verification task (SECV task). After reading a sentence, participants had to judge whether a probe word, displayed in either a high or low position on the screen, was congruent or incongruent with the previous sentence. The question was whether the emotion induced by the sentence could modulate the responses to the probes as a function of their position in a vertical axis by means of a metaphorical conceptual–spatial association. Overall, the results indicate that mapping of emotions on vertical space can occur for linguistic units larger than words, but only when the task demands an explicit affective evaluation of the target.
Additionally, most of the work on this topic has used visual words as the typical experimental stimuli. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined the association between affect and vertical space by using a cross-modal procedure. We have examined whether auditory words with an emotional valence can interact with the vertical visual space according to a ‘positive-up/negative-down’ embodied metaphor. The general method consisted in the presentation of a spoken word denoting a positive/negative emotion prior to the spatial localization of a visual target in an upper or lower position. Our results are discussed within the framework of the embodiment hypothesis.