Affect and Social Cognition Research Lab

 

How do people determine whether something is good or bad?  Why do some people become less angry than others when provoked?  Our lab examines the social-cognitive mechanisms involved in affective experiences like these.  Although we have a strong interest in several areas of affect and social-cognition (e.g., aggression, attitudes, personality), in particular, we focus on metaphor representation.  Metaphors describe affect (e.g., the broad concept of good and bad) in terms that borrow from sensation and perception (e.g., perceptions of vertical position -- "I'm feeling up").  Our research reveals that metaphors are more than simple communication devices, but are also indicative of a deeply perceptual mode of knowledge representation.  We typically use evaluative paradigms (i.e., asking participants to determine if a stimulus is good or bad) to model affective behavior.  We find that when people evaluate stimuli, they are influenced by the perceptual characteristics of those stimuli in a metaphor-consistent manner.  For example, people are more efficient at detecting a positive stimulus (e.g., the word "candy") if it is presented higher (versus lower) in space, white (versus black) in color, and larger (versus smaller) in size.  The reverse is true for negative stimuli.  Our research reveals that people’s representations of affective concepts have a metaphorical structure, such that merely thinking in an affective manner seems to activate metaphor-relevant perceptions.  We have multiple ongoing projects that examine several aspects of metaphor representation including how it develops, the consequences it has for social interaction, and the limits it might place on judgments and decisions.

 

Research Lab in McCreary 301