Taste Metaphors Ground Emotion Concepts Through the Shared Attribute of Valence.

ABSTRACT: "Parting is such sweet sorrow." Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral "odd-one-out" task in an online sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concept

SUBMITTER: Avery JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9314637 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature