Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do metaphors shape people’s emotional states and mindsetsfor dealing with hardship? Natural language metaphors mayact as frames that encourage people to reappraise anemotional situation, changing the way they respond to it.Recovery from cancer is one type of adversity that manypeople face, and it can be mediated by the mindset peopleadopt. We investigate whether two common metaphors fordescribing a cancer experience – the battle and the journey –encourage people to make different inferences about thepatient’s emotional state. After being exposed to the battlemetaphor participants inferred that the patient would feelmore guilt if he didn’t recover, while after being exposed tothe journey metaphor participants felt that he had a betterchance of making peace with his situation. We discussimplications of this work for investigations of metaphor andemotion, mindsets, and recovery.