How Would You Hold a Coke with Wings? Symbolic Salience and Individual Differences in Metaphorical Thought

Metaphors are central to human thought (Kövecses, 2010; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and in this talk I will demonstrate how a visual search task can reveal the automatic processes underlying metaphor-based cognition. In an initial study, participants viewed target faces (happy or angry) among neutral distractors positioned at the top, bottom, left, and right of the screen. Consistent with the “UP = GOOD” metaphor, happy faces were detected more rapidly in the top position than the bottom, with no comparable horizontal effect—suggesting a stronger association of vertical space with positive affect (Damjanovic & Santiago, 2016).

When affective salience was manipulated, the “UP = GOOD” metaphor emerged for neutral faces but not for socially low-value objects (e.g., cars), and a meta-analysis confirmed the strongest attentional benefit for happy expressions. Moreover, incorporating a personality framework revealed that individuals low in agreeableness exhibited faster detection of happy faces at the top, whereas those high in agreeableness responded more quickly to angry faces in the same location. Overall, these findings suggest that the mapping underlying the conceptual representation of emotion is flexible, influenced by both symbolic salience and individual differences in maintaining good relationships with others.

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