Is sadness blue? The problem of using figurative language for emotions on psychological tests

Springer Science and Business Media LLC - Tập 49 - Trang 443-456 - 2016
Matthew J. Roe1, Kelly E. Grob2, Kimberly A. Barchard2
1Department of Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA
2Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

Tóm tắt

Psychological tests sometimes include figurative language like I feel blue. However, figurative language may not mean the same thing cross-culturally. Previous research found cross-cultural evidence for 14 conceptual metaphors and metonymies for emotions (e.g., sadness is blue). Our two studies asked participants (total n = 795) in the USA and India whether happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are associated with certain descriptors (blue, down, bright, etc.). Most participants in both countries endorsed ten of the 14 hypothesized associations; however, the percentage of participants endorsing an association was often far from 100 %. For example, in the USA, only 71.7 % associated hot with anger and only 65.9 % associated blue with sadness. Moreover, descriptors were often associated with more than one emotion. Furthermore, only two associations (happiness is up and bright) were endorsed by more than 90 % of participants in both countries and had descriptors that were not associated with additional emotions. We conclude that figurative language is often ambiguous and should be used with caution on psychological tests unless there is evidence the language is understood cross-culturally. Advice to this effect is currently lacking from psychometrics textbooks and should be added.

Từ khóa

#Cognitive Psychology

Tài liệu tham khảo

Aiken, L. R., & Groth-Marnat, G. (2006). Psychological testing and assessment (12th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Allik, J., & Realo, A. (1997). Emotional experience and its relation to the five-factor model in Estonian. Journal of Personality, 65, 625–647. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1997.tb00329.x647 Amazon Web Services (2014). Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester UI Guide. Retrieved from http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/RequesterUI/Welcome.html Antin, J., & Shaw, A. (2012) Social desirability bias and self-reports of motivation: A study of Amazon Mechanical Turk in the US and India. Presented at Association for Computing Machinery SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX. Apresjan, V. (1997). Emotion metaphors and cross-linguistic conceptualization of emotions. Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa, 6, 179–196. Baker, C., & Jones, S. P. (Eds.). (1998). Encyclopedia of bilingualism and bilingual education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Barbee, E. L. (2009). Healing time: The blues and African-American women. Health Care for Women International, 15, 53–60. doi:10.1080/07399339409516094 Barcelona, A. (2003). Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads: A cognitive perspective (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Beck, A. T. (1972). Depression: Causes and treatment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 3–5. doi:10.1177/1745691610393980 Cacioppo, J. T., Bernston, G. G., Larsen, J. T., Poehlmann, K. M., & Ito, T. A. (2000). The psychophysiology of emotion. In R. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), The handbook of emotion (2nd ed., pp. 173–191). New York: Guildford Press. Census of India (2011). Population enumeration data. [Data file]. Retrieved from http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/indiaatglance.html Chand, V. (2008). Fire and hot liquids: Anger in Hindi and English. In F. Boers, J. Darquennes, K. Kerremans, & R. Temmerman (Eds.), Multilingualism and applied comparative linguistics volume 2 (pp. 2–23). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Chen, P. (2010). A cognitive study of "happiness" metaphors in English and Chinese idioms. Asian Culture and History, 2, 172–175. doi:10.5539/ach.v2n2p172 Chen, J., Kacinik, N. A., Chen, Y., & Wu, N. (2014). Metaphorical color representations of emotional concepts in English and Chinese speakers: Evidence from behavioral data. Poster session presented at Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, Long Beach, CA. Cohen, J. (1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 155–159. doi:10.1037//0033-2909.112.1.155 Corral, I., & Landrine, H. (2009). Methodological and statistical strategies in research with diverse samples. The problem of measurement equivalence. In H. Landrine & N. F. Russ (Eds.), Handbook of diversity in feminist psychology (pp. 83–134). New York: Springer. Danesi, M. (1992). Metaphorical competence in second language acquisition and second language teaching: The neglected dimension. In J. E. Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1992. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Davitz, J. R. (1969). The language of emotion. New York: Academic Press. Deignan, A. (2005). A corpus linguistic perspective on the relationship between metonymy and metaphor. Style, 39, 72–91. Department of Official Language (2011). The official languages: Use for official purpose of the union (4th ed.). Retrieved from http://www.rajbhasha.nic.in/UI/pagecontent.aspx?pc=Mzk%3d Ding, F. (2012). The interaction between metaphor and metonymy in emotion category. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2, 2384–2397. doi:10.4304/tpls.2.11.2384-2397 Dobrovol’skiĭ, D., & Piirainen, E. (2005). Figurative language: Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives. Oxford: Elsevier. Dor-Shav, N. K., & Dor-Shav, Z. (1978). Cross-cultural study of ratings of phenomenological experience of emotion. Psychological Reports, 42, 583–590. doi:10.2466/pr0.1978.42.2.583 Eaton, W. W., Muntaner, C., Smith, C., Tien, A., & Ybarra, M. (2004). Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale: Review and revision (CESD and CESD-R). In M. E. Maruish (Ed.), The use of psychological testing for treatment planning and outcomes assessment (3rd ed., pp. 362–377). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, 124–129. doi:10.1037/h0030377 Fainsilber, L., & Ortony, A. (1987). Metaphorical uses of language in the expression of emotions. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 24, 239–250. doi:10.1207/s15327868ms0204_2 Fay, A. J., & Maner, J. K. (2014). Embodied effects are moderated by situational cues: Warmth, threat, and the desire for affiliation. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54, 291–305. doi:10.1111/bjso.12088 Ferro-Luzzi, G. E. (1995). The culture-free construction of emotion. A Tamil writer’s emotion similes and metaphors. Anthropos, 90, 185–192. Fetterman, A. K., Robinson, M. D., Gordon, R. D., & Elliot, A. J. (2011). Anger as seeing red: Perceptual sources of evidence. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 2, 311–316. doi:10.1177/1948550610390051 Fetterman, A. K., Robinson, M. D., & Meier, B. P. (2012). Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association. Cognition and Emotion, 26, 1445–1458. doi:10.1080/02699931.2012.673477 Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunther, Y. H. (2004). The phenomenology and intentionality of emotion. Philosophical Studies, 117, 43–55. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000014524.65244.9d Gupta, N., Martin, D., Hanrahan, B. V., & O’Neill, J. (2014). Turk-life in India. Presentation at Association for Computing Machinery convention, Sanibel Island, FL. doi:10.1145/2660398.2660403 Haboush-Deloye, A. (2013). Assessing conceptual equivalence of measures of suppression in diverse populations [Doctoral dissertation]. Retrieved from http://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/1831/ Hofstede, G. (1983). The cultural relativity of organizational practices and theories. Journal of International Business Studies, 14, 75–89. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8490867 Hogan, R. (1969). Development of an empathy scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 33, 307–316. doi:10.1037/h0027580 Hogan, T. P. (2015). Psychological testing: A practical introduction (3rd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. Hurtienne, J., Stößel, C., & Weber, K. (2009). Sad is heavy and happy is light: Population stereotypes of tangible object attributes. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, United Kingdom (pp. 61–68). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. doi:10.1145/1517664.1517686 Ijzerman, H., Gallucci, M., Pouw, W. T., Weiβgerber, S. C., Van Doesum, N. J., & Williams, K. D. (2012). Cold-blooded loneliness: Social exclusion leads to lower skin temperatures. Acta Psychologica, 140, 283–288. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.05.002 James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 2). London: Macmillan. Kaviani, H., & Hamedi, R. (2011). A quantitative/qualitative study on metaphors used by Persian depressed patients. Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 4, 5–13. Kaya, N., & Epps, H. H. (2005). Color-emotion associations: Past experience and personal preference. In J. L. Caivano (Ed.), AIC 2004 Color and Paints, Proceedings of the Interim Meeting of the International Color Association (pp. 31-34). Porto Alegre, Brazil Retrieved from http://www.fadu.uba.ar/sitios/sicyt/color/aic2004/031-034.pdf Kennedy, A. S. (2011). Color idioms in different languages. In Alan S. Kennedy’s color/language project. Retrieved from http://www.starchamber.com/colors/color-idioms.html Khajeh, Z., Ho-Abdullah, I., & Hua, T. K. (2013). Emotional temperament in food-related metaphors: A cross-cultural account of the conceptualizations of sadness. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 2, 54–62. doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.2n.6p.54 Kline, T. J. B. (2005). Psychological testing: A practical approach to design and evaluation. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Kövecses, Z. (1986). Metaphors of anger, pride, and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. In Pragmatics and Beyond, VII:8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kövecses, Z. (1990). Emotion concepts. New York: Springer–Verlag. Kövecses, Z. (1991). Happiness: A definitional effort. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 6, 29–46. doi:10.1207/s15327868ms0601_2 Kövecses, Z. (2000). The concept of anger: Universal or culture specific? Psychopathology, 33, 159–170. doi:10.1159/000029139 Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Z. (2009). Metaphor: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Z. (2013). The metaphor-metonymy relationship: Correlation metaphors are based on metonymy. Metaphor & Symbol, 28, 75–88. doi:10.1080/10926488.2013.768498 Kreibig, S. D. (2010). Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review. Biological Psychology, 84, 394–421. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.03.010 Kubiszyn, T., & Borich, G. (2007). Educational testing and measurement: Classroom application and practice (8th ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. Lai, V. T., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). The immediate and chronic influence of spatio-temporal metaphors on the mental representations of time in English, Mandarin, and Mandarin-English speakers. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 142. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00142 Lakoff, G. (2009). The neural theory of metaphor. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1437794 Lakoff, G. (2014). Mapping the brain's metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 958. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00958 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., & Kövecses, Z. (1987). The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought (pp. 195–221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, X. (2010). A comparative analysis of English and Chinese idioms: From the perspective of conceptual metaphor of “happiness". Journal of Language Teaching & Research, 1, 473–476. doi:10.4304/jltr.1.4.473-476 Litman, L., Robinson, J., & Rosenzweig, C. (2015). The relationship between motivation, monetary compensation, and data quality among US- and India-based workers on Mechanical Turk. Behavior Research Methods, 47, 519–528. doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0483-x Liu, X., & Zhao, G. (2013). A comparative study of emotion metaphors between English and Chinese. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3, 155–162. doi:10.4304/tpls.3.1.155-162 Lovett, R. (2013). 20 British words that mean something totally different in the U.S. [Web blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.bigstockphoto.com/blog/20-british-words-that-mean-something-totally-different-in-the-us Luodonpää-Manni, M., & Viimaranta, J. (2010). Metaphoric expressions on vertical axis revisited: An empirical study of Russian and French material. Metaphor and Symbol, 25, 74–92. doi:10.1080/10926481003715994 Maalej, Z. (2007). The embodiment of fear expressions in Tunisian Arabic: Theoretical and practical implications. In F. Sharifian & G. B. Palmer (Eds.), Applied cultural linguistics: Second language teaching/learning and intercultural communication (pp. 87–104). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/celcr.7.07maa Maroto, J., & De Bortoli, M. (2001). Translating colours in web site localization. In Proceedings of the European Languages and the Implementation of Communication and Information Technologies (Elicit) Conference, United Kingdom. Retrieved from http://globalpropaganda.com/articles/TranslatingColours.pdf Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2011). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 1–23. doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0124-6 Matsuki, K. (1995). Metaphors of anger in Japanese. In J. R. Taylor & R. E. MacLaury (Eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (pp. 137–151). Berlin: de Gruyter. Matsumoto, D., & Ekman, P. (1989). American-Japanese cultural differences in intensity ratings of facial expressions of emotion. Motivation and Emotion, 13, 143–157. doi:10.1007/bf00992959 Matsumoto, D., & Yoo, S. (2007). Methodological considerations in the study of emotion across cultures. In J. A. Coan & J. J. B. Allen (Eds.), Handbook of emotion elicitation and assessment (pp. 332–348). New York: Oxford University Press. Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D. R., & Salovey, P. (2000). Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence. Intelligence, 27, 267–298. doi:10.1016/S0160-2896(99)00016-1 McIntire, S. A., & Miller, L. A. (2007). Foundations of psychological testing: A practical approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage. McMullen, L. M., & Conway, J. B. (2002). Conventional metaphors for depression. In S. Fussel (Ed.), The verbal communication of emotions: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 167–181). Mahwah: Erlbaum. Meier, B. P., & Robinson, M. D. (2005). The metaphorical representation of affect. Metaphor and Symbol, 20, 239–257. doi:10.1207/s15327868ms2004_1 Mikolajczuk, A. (1998). The metonymic and metaphoric conceptualization of ‘anger’ in Polish. In A. Athanasjadou & E. Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualization and expression (pp. 153–191). Berlin: Mouton. Moradi, M. R., & Mashak, S. P. (2013). A comparative and contrastive study of sadness conceptualization in Persian and English. English Linguistics Research, 2, 107–112. doi:10.5430/elr.v2n1p107 Omori, A. (2008). Emotion as a huge mass of moving water. Metaphor and Symbol, 23, 130–146. doi:10.1080/10926480801944277 Oster, U. (2010). Using corpus methodology for semantic and pragmatic analyses: What can corpora tell us about the linguistic expression of emotions? Cognitive Linguistics, 21, 727–763. doi:10.1515/COGL.2010.023 Paolacci, G., & Chandler, J. (2014). Inside the turk: Understanding Mechanical Turk as a participant pool. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 184–188. doi:10.1177/0963721414531598 Partridge, E. (2006). A dictionary of slang and unconventional English. Abingdon: Routledge. Porter, J. (1807). Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks (Vol. 2, p. 81). London, England: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?oe=UTF-8&id=xxElAAAAMAAJ&q=happiness+is+like+a+sunbeam#v=onepage&q&f=false Pritzker, S. (2003). The role of metaphor in culture, consciousness, and medicine: A preliminary inquiry into the metaphors of depression in Chinese and Western medical and common languages. Clinical Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine, 4, 11–28. doi:10.1016/S1461-1449(02)00013-0 Radloff, L. S. (1977). The CES-D Scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 385–401. doi:10.1177/014662167700100306 Rand, D. G. (2012). The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 299, 172–179. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.03.004 Ross, J., Irani, I., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., & Tomlinson, B. (2010). Who are the crowdworkers?: Shifting demographics in Amazon Mechanical Turk. CHI EA '10: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2863–2872. doi:10.1145/1753846.1753873 Ruben, B. D. (1985). The coming of the information age: Information, technology, and the study of behavior. Information and Behavior, 1. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Russell, J. A. (1991). Culture and the categorization of emotions. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 426–450. doi:10.1037//0033-2909.110.3.426 Salkind, N. J. (2006). Tests and measurement for people who (think they) hate tests and measurement. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Salokangas, R. K., Vaahtera, K., Pacriev, S., Sohlman, B., & Lehtinen, V. (2002). Gender differences in depressive symptoms: An artefact caused by measurement instruments? Journal of Affective Disorders, 68, 215–220. doi:10.1016/S0165-0327(00)00315-3 Sandford, J. L. (2014). Turn a colour with emotion: A linguistic construction of colour in English. Journal of the International Colour Association, 13, 67–83. Scherer, K. R., & Wallbott, H. G. (1994). Evidence for universality and cultural variation of differential emotion response patterning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 310–328. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.66.2.310 Schwitzgebel, E. (2006). Do some people literally see red when they’re angry? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-some-people-literally-see-red-when_27.html Shweder, R. A. (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Soriano, C., & Valenzuela, J. (2009). Emotion and colour across languages: Implicit associations in Spanish colour terms. Social Science Information, 48, 421–445. doi:10.1177/0539018409106199 Sprouse, J. (2011). A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 155–167. doi:10.3758/s13428-010-0039-7 Stemmler, G. (2004). Physiological processes during emotion. In P. Philippot & R. S. Feldman (Eds.), The regulation of emotion (pp. 33–70). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Strugielska, A., & Alonso-Alonso, M. R. (2007). Idiomatic expressions in multicultural integration: A cross-linguistic perspective. In A. Cervantes-Carson & I. Lazaroms (Eds.), The politics of multiculturalism: Questions across disciplines. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Sun, H. (2010). The cognitive study of metaphor and its application in English language teaching. Canadian Social Science, 6, 175–179 Takšić, V. (2005). Basic psychometric properties of Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire (ESCQ) in Croatian samples. Oral presentation in the Symposium Cross-cultural validation of Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire (ESCQ) at the 9th European Congress of Psychology, Granada, Spain. Tao, J., Tan, T., & Picard, R. W. (2005). Affective computing and intelligent interaction. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Tendahl, M., & Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (2008). Complementary perspectives on metaphor: Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1823–1864. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.02.001 Tolaas, J. (1991). Notes on the origin of some spatialization metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 6, 201–218. doi:10.1207/s15327868ms0603_4 United States Census Bureau (2012a). Table 53. Languages spoken at home: 2009. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0053.pdf United States Census Bureau (2012b). Section 1: Population. In The 2012 Statistical Abstract. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012edition.html Waggoner, J. E. (2010). Temperature-based metonymies for emotions in children and adults. Psychological Reports, 106, 233–245. doi:10.2466/PR0.106.1.233-245 Waggoner, J. E., & Palermo, D. S. (1989). Betty is a bouncing bubble: Children's comprehension of emotion-descriptive metaphors. Developmental Psychology, 25, 152–163. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.25.1.152 Waggoner, J. E., & Palermo, D. S. (1991). Contextual and linguistic factors in children's comprehension of emotional metaphors. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, New Orleans, LA. Wang, D., Wang, J., & Xing, M. (2011). Metaphorical thinking in English and Chinese languages. Asian Culture and History, 3, 9–12. doi:10.5539/ach.v3n2p9 Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1994). Manual for the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule – Expanded Form. Iowa City: The University of Iowa. Watson, M., & Greer, S. (1983). Development of a questionnaire measure of emotional control. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 27(4), 299–305. doi:10.1016/0022-3999(83)90052-1 Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegan, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063 Yu, N. (1995). Metaphorical expression of anger and happiness in English and Chinese. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10, 223–245. doi:10.1207/s15327868ms1002_1 Yu, N. (1998). The contemporary theory of metaphor: A perspective from Chinese language. Philadelphia: John Benjamins North America. Yu, N. (2002). Body and emotion: Body parts in Chinese expression of emotion. Pragmatics and Cognition, 10, 341–367. doi:10.1075/pc.10.12.14yu Zavyalova, N. (2013). Socio-cultural acquisition through idiomatic representation. World Applied Sciences Journal, 27, 445–449. doi:10.5829/idosi.wasj.2013.27.elelc.91 Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Chen, X., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2012). Heartwarming memories: Nostalgia maintains physiological comfort. Emotion, 12, 678–684. doi:10.1037/a0027236