Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatial metaphors for affective valence are common inEnglish, where up in space=happy/positive and down inspace=sad/negative. Past research suggests that thesemetaphors have some measure of psychological reality:people are faster to respond to valenced words and faceswhen they are presented in metaphor-congruent regions ofspace. Here we explore whether the orientation of a stimulus– rather than its position – is sufficient to elicit such spatial-valence congruency effects, and, if so, which spatial referenceframe(s) people use to represent this orientation. InExperiment 1, participants viewed images of happy and sadprofile faces in different orientations and had to identify theemotion depicted in each face. In Experiment 2, participantscompleted this task while lying down on their sides, therebydisassociating environmental and egocentric reference frames.Experiment 1 revealed a metaphor-congruent interactionbetween emotion and orientation, while Experiment 2revealed that this spatial-valence congruency effect was onlyreliable in the environmental frame of reference.