ArticlePsychological research2017
Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: a cross-linguistic study.
Article in Psychological research, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- A dual-process account of metaphorical embodiment.Psychological research · 2026Review
- Does slow flow mean calmness? Metaphorical connection mechanism between emotional concepts and water flow.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Where the 'bad' and the 'good' go: A multi-lab direct replication report of Casasanto (2009, Experiment 1).Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- The neurophysiological mechanism of valence-space congruency effect: evidence from spatial Stroop task and event-related EEG features.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2023Article
- The Joyful Life: An Existential-Humanistic Approach to Positive Psychology in the Time of a Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The development of dynamic perceptual simulations during sentence comprehension.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change.Progress in human geography · 2020Article
- Moved by Emotions: Affective Concepts Representing Personal Life Events Induce Freely Performed Steps in Line With Combined Sagittal and Lateral Space-Valence Associations.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The Influence of Event Valence and Emotional States on the Metaphorical Comprehension of Time.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The Allocation of Valenced Percepts Onto 3D Space.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
The valence-space metaphor posits that emotion concepts map onto vertical space such that positive concepts are in upper locations and negative in lower locations. Whilst previous studies have demonstrated this pattern for positive and negative emotions e.g. 'joy' and 'sadness', the spatial location of neutral emotions, e.g. 'surprise', has not been investigated, and little is known about the effect of linguistic background. In this study, we first characterised the emotions joy, surprise and sadness via ratings of their concreteness, imageability, context availability and valence before examining the allocation of these emotions in vertical space. Participants from six linguistic groups completed either a rating task used to characterise the emotions or a word allocation task to implicitly assess where these emotions are positioned in vertical space. Our findings suggest that, across languages, gender, handedness, and ages, positive emotions are located in upper spatial locations and negative emotions in lower spatial locations. In addition, we found that the neutral emotional valence of surprise is reflected in this emotion being mapped mid-way between upper and lower locations onto the vertical plane. This novel finding indicates that the location of a concept on the vertical plane mimics the concept's degree of emotional valence.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.