Meier, Robinson, and Clore: "Why Good Guys Wear White" (2004)

OK, now I'm officially confused.

In their 2007 study, Meier and Robinson found that affective cues prime spatial position, but not other way around:

TARGET (affect) →  SOURCE (position)

In this 2004 study — which contains the same references, the same statistical methods, the same ideas — Meier, Robinson, and Clore show that color primes affect, but not the other way around:

TARGET (affect)  ←  SOURCE (color)

In other words, they show two completely opposite things, and no one seems to have pointed this out.

Experimental Design

In the 2004 paper, the set-up is the following:

They show a number of words on a computer screen. Some are shown in a dark font, some in a bright; some words are positive, some negative. For instance, you could be shown the word candy in a dark gray font, or the word fickle in a bright gray font.

In the first batch of experiments, the subjects were told to determine the valence of the words as quickly as possible; this turns out to be easier when the color and the valence are congruent (e.g., the word sincere in a bright gray color).

In the second part, the subjects were told to determine the color of the font. This is easy, and word valence didn't make a difference.

Here's my own little mock-up of such a test material, so you can try it out yourself — say as quickly whether the following words are positive or negative:

gentle

bitter

cruel

trust

If you're like the average person in this study, then you're about 2% or 3% slower at making the judgment about the last two items (although you might be much faster at recognizing positive words in general).

As the authors say, this effect can be compared to that of the Stroop experiment, although the conflict here is indirect — there is no literal contradiction between trust and "black" (p. 86).

Order and Association

The authors interpret the asymmetry between color and word valence in terms of "a race model in which physical cues … are available before stimulus valence is" (p. 85).

If this is true, then the order is: First, you notice the white letters; then, the whiteness primes your valence judgment; and then, you finish reading the word. This would then mean that the appreciation of the color and its associated valence is "obligatory," and that people can't ignore it while making semantic judgments (p. 86).

This, however, does not show that we think about the abstract concept in terms of the concrete: If anything, it shows the opposite.

It thus seems that cognitive metaphor theorists can choose between two empirical results when they dig through the psychological literature — one that supports that idea of understanding-in-terms-of, and another that supports a "deep" metaphorical comprehension process. This would be wonderful if it weren't for the fact that the two papers both forcefully argue against the point made in the other.

Meier and Robinson: "Why the Sunny Side Is Up" (2004)

This Psychological Science paper by Brian P. Meier and Michael D. Robinson is a report on three experiments which collectively show that

1. reading positive and negative words facilitates the recognition of letters that are placed high or a low, respectively,
2. but looking up and down does facilitate the comprehension of positive and negative words.

In the terminology of Judea Pearl, we can thus say that activation of GOOD causes activation of UP, and BAD of DOWN:

Another result that came out of the experiments was that people recognize positive words faster than negative words, regardless of condition. Meier and Robinson do not discuss this effect explicitly, and I'm also not sure what to make of it.

From GOOD to UP, Not from UP to GOOD

The paper opens with a discussion of an experiment which shows that people are faster at judging whether a word is "positive" or "negative" if it's placed in a position on the computer screen which is congruent with the meaning. When the word polite is flashed at the top of the screen, for instance, you're faster at pressing the button corresponding to "positive" than when it flashes at the bottom.

This shows a correlation, but does not disentangle the question of causation. To do this, the two variables need to be manipulated independently of each other. This was achieved in two follow-up experiments which placed a spatial judgment task before or after a valence judgment task.

In the first of these follow-up experiments, the GOOD-to-UP direction was set up by a design looking roughly as follows:

That is, first the subject made a judgment about the valence of a word, and then about the identity of a letter which was presented in either a high or a low position. The last screen showed the word INCORRECT if the subject failed at the second task (as I've assumed in this example). This study found a significant facilitation effect.

The second follow-up experiment set up the UP-to-GOOD direction in a design that may be pictured thus:
 

Here, the subject first had to identify where a spatial cue was, and then to judge the valence of a word. In this task, they found no facilitation effect.

Is This Consistent With Cognitive Metaphor Theory?

In their brief conclusion, Meier and Robinson write:

These findings suggest that, when making evaluations, people automatically assume that objects that are high in visual space are good, whereas objects that are low in visual space are bad. (p. 247)

But there's an issue buried here which is usually evaded in cognitive metaphor theory: In which direction do the connections between source and target domain run? Meier and Robinson's results as well as the notion of "understanding in terms of" suggest that the connections run from target domain to source domain.

This analysis, however, leaves cognitive metaphor theory with little explanatory value with respect to word semantics. Consider for instance this paradigmatic instance of a "conceptual" metaphor:

• I'm feeling up.

According to the standard analysis, I understand that the word up here means "good" because the domain of spatial position translates into the domain of moods.

But this is exactly the opposite association of what we need. Meier and Robinson's show that we have a completely literal understanding of spatial position, and that looking upwards doesn't associate to feeling good:

People can use their senses to determine whether an object is up or down, white or black. There is no need to borrow metaphor to achieve an understanding of vertical position. Because of these considerations, we view it as unlikely that physical cues, in the absence of an evaluative context, activate evaluations. (p. 245)

There is thus no neurological reason why the word up should activate the meaning "good."

While Meier and Robinson thus offer excellent evidence in favor of a system of analogies in thought, it is not obvious that these should be responsible for the way we understand metaphorical language—only that they can be seen during our comprehension of literal language. To my mind, this creates a huge problem for cognitive metaphor theory, in particular in its more recent brain-talky incarnation.