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Failing to take the moral high ground: Psychopathy and the vertical representation of morality

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Abstract

Morality is explained in metaphors that use descriptions of verticality (e.g., “an upstanding citizen”). It is unknown, however, if these metaphors simply aid communication or indicate a deeper mode of knowledge representation. In two experiments, we sought to determine the extent to which verticality is used when encoding moral concepts. Furthermore, because psychopaths are characterized by a lack of moral concern, we believed this personality dimension could act as an important moderator. Experiment 1 established that people have implicit associations between morality and vertical space. Experiment 2 extended this finding by revealing that people low in psychopathy encoded moral-related (vs. immoral-related) concepts faster if they were presented in a high (vs. low) vertical position. This effect did not occur for participants high in psychopathy. Our results indicate that morality is partially represented on the vertical dimension, but not for individuals with little concern for morality.

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... The high and low positions indicating the height of the top of gates and roofs were used to indicate the scale of a building. The asterisks (***) at the top and bottom of the computer screen were used to indicate the high and low positions (Meier et al., 2007;Carney et al., 2015). See Fig. 1. ...
... One-way analysis of variance showed that there was not a significant difference in the liking degree between the golden yellow (2.75 ± 1.12) and gray (2.35 ± 1.27), F (1, 38) = 1.12, p = 0.297, η p 2 = 0.03. In the Stroop task (Hill & Lapsley, 2009;Meier et al., 2007), each trial began with a white fixation '+' at the center of the screen for 500 ms. Then, the target words were presented in the center of the screen. ...
... Both expansive and constricted body postures are in sitting position (Meier et al., 2007;Carney et al., 2015;Huang et al., 2010;Park et al., 2013), and a male model was sitting in a chair with a backrest. In the expansive posture, the model was instructed to sit with his back straight, hands naturally placed on the chair's armrests and stretch his legs beyond the edge of the chair. ...
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This study explored how individuals metaphorically represent the concepts of poor and rich. Human psychological activity and behavior are products of culture and history. The traditional Chinese culture left traces of how poverty and wealth are perceived. And the way of perceiving and describing poverty and wealth, revealed in the Chinese language, is preserved and passed down. Implicit Association Test (IAT) tasks and Stroop Tasks were used to investigate the metaphorical representations of poverty and wealth in terms of building scale, color, and body posture. The first three experiments found that the participants tended to associate poverty-related words with smaller building scale, gray color, and constricted posture, compared to wealth-related words. In contrast, they associated wealth-related words with greater building scale, golden yellow color and expansive body posture, when comparing with poverty-related words. Moreover, the last two experiments verified the metaphors of poverty and wealth, while the two-character modern Chinese words were used in daily life.
... This dissociation might lead to an "immorality bias", such that immoral concepts (e.g., dishonest, evil) tended to be more salient than moral ones (e.g., caring, charity). Consequently, the recognition of immoral traits needs increased attention and thus takes longer reaction times [36,37], which is considered an evolutionarily adaptive strategy [2]. ...
... Existing studies on moral concept encoding in humans concentrated on the metaphorical representations of moral traits, including space [36,37], cleanliness [38,39], brightness [37], and physical forms [35]. Compared to immoral concepts, moral concepts were recognized faster when presented at a higher position on the computer screen, in non-distorted fonts, and with better self/environmental cleanliness. ...
... First, both RT and ACC data of our study showed a pronounced "immorality bias" effect, in line with studies on the vertical representation of English moral concepts [36,37]. While existing studies suggested that cultural and linguistic backgrounds might modulate people's moral decision making [4,17], our behavioral results indicated that immorality bias was persistent across languages. ...
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Morality has been an integral part of social cognition and our daily life, and different languages may exert distinct impacts on human moral judgment. However, it remains unclear how moral concept is encoded in the bilingual brain. This study, therefore, aimed to explore the emotional and cognitive involvement of bilingual morality judgement by using combined event-related potential (ERP) and psychophysiological (including skin, heart, and pulse) measures. In the experiment, thirty-one Chinese–English bilingual participants were asked to make moral judgments in Chinese and English, respectively. Our results revealed increased early frontal N400 and decreased LPC in L1 moral concept encoding as compared to L2, suggesting that L1 was more reliant on automatic processes and emotions yet less on elaboration. In contrast, L2 moral and immoral concepts elicited enhanced LPC, decreased N400, and greater automatic psychophysiological electrocardiograph responses, which might reflect more elaborate processing despite blunted emotional responses and increased anxiety. Additionally, both behavioral and P200 data revealed a reliable immorality bias across languages. Our results were discussed in light of the dual-process framework of moral judgments and the (dis)embodiment of bilingual processing, which may advance our understanding of the interplay between language and morality as well as between emotion and cognition.
... Among these subjective experiences, research on spatial metaphors mainly investigates vertical spatial metaphors for morality, compared to other spatial metaphors, since we have direct and profound understanding for vertical spatial concepts with our daily experience of gravity (Gibbs, 2006;Jia, 2014, unpublished). Popular paradigms on this topic include the spatial Stroop task (Meier et al., 2007) and the implicit association test (IAT; Meier and Robinson, 2004;Meier et al., 2007). The spatial Stroop task, also called the categorization task, required participants to categorize words as moral or immoral when each word appeared in the upper half or lower half of the screen (Meier and Robinson, 2004;Li and Xu, 2012). ...
... Among these subjective experiences, research on spatial metaphors mainly investigates vertical spatial metaphors for morality, compared to other spatial metaphors, since we have direct and profound understanding for vertical spatial concepts with our daily experience of gravity (Gibbs, 2006;Jia, 2014, unpublished). Popular paradigms on this topic include the spatial Stroop task (Meier et al., 2007) and the implicit association test (IAT; Meier and Robinson, 2004;Meier et al., 2007). The spatial Stroop task, also called the categorization task, required participants to categorize words as moral or immoral when each word appeared in the upper half or lower half of the screen (Meier and Robinson, 2004;Li and Xu, 2012). ...
... In the IAT, participants first determined whether a prime stimulus was at the top or bottom of a computer screen, and then whether the word appeared on the center of the screen had a moral or immoral meaning (Greenwald et al., 1998;Meier and Robinson, 2004;Jia, 2014, unpublished). Most research using these paradigms found that the moral words (e.g., upright) were categorized faster when the prime stimuli were presented toward the top of the screen, whereas the negative words (e.g., low-minded) were categorized faster when the prime stimuli presented toward the bottom of the screen (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999;Meier et al., 2007;Hill and Lapsley, 2009;Wang and Lu, 2013;Jia, 2014, unpublished). This revealed that the vertical spatial metaphors for morality were stable across different cultures. ...
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Metaphor is a bridge for understanding abstract concepts (the target domain) from concrete concepts (the source domain). This study, with two experiments, aimed to investigate the cultural differences of the horizontal spatial metaphors for morality between two groups of students: Han Chinese, the ethnic majority, and Hui Chinese, an ethnic minority in China. Experiment 1 adopted a spatial Stroop task. It showed that neither Hui nor Han students exhibited horizontal spatial metaphors for morality. Experiment 2 adopted a modified implicit association test paradigm to enhance the association between the moral concepts and the horizontal spatial positions. In Experiment 2, we found horizontal spatial metaphors for morality in Hui students, but not in Han students. These results indicated that the differences of horizontal spatial metaphors between Hui and Han participants were influenced by the different cultures they live in. Moreover, this study also found that the association between the source domain and the target domain was an important factor for metaphor formations.
... The metaphor was important in the relation between environment and morality [18,30,31]. For example, researchers found that physical factors, such as color, size, brightness, and distance, were related to moral judgements [32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. The brightness of the environment influenced individual morality, which found participants in slightly dimly lit rooms have more cheating behavior than those in well-lit rooms [39]. ...
... Experiment 3b further tested the association between the conception of spaciousness and tolerant cognition by implicit measurement and revealed that there was metaphor association between the concept of spaciousness and tolerant cognition, as well as between the concept of narrowness and the harsh cognition. These findings are consistent with our hypotheses and provide some evidence for the effects of metaphors in cognitive judgment [33,58]. Because the origin domain of metaphor comes from the body's perceptual-motor system and the experience of environmental interaction, the rich experiences (somatic sensations, proprioception, spatial relational shapes, and kinesthetic manipulation experiences) gained by the body in its continuous interaction with the spatiotemporal environment become the origin structure for the formation of metaphor. ...
Article
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The physical environment plays an important role in moral cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that the physical environment affects individual moral judgment. Investigators have argued that the environment influences moral judgment through emotion and cognition, such as during metaphor processing. Following the intensification of urbanization and increases in population size, the phenomenon of a narrow environment has become more common. However, the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment has not been thoroughly examined. We examined the effect of environmental spaciousness (spaciousness vs. narrowness) on moral judgments in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Results showed that participants report a higher rating score of moral judgment in more spacious environments compared with narrow environments. We further explored the roles of emotion and metaphor in the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgments. We found support for a partial mediation effect of emotion in the relationship between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment. The results also supported an association between the concept of spaciousness and tolerant cognition. Spacious environments may elicit positive emotions and more tolerant cognition, which in turn influences moral judgment. These results provide new evidence for the influence of the environment on moral judgments, and more attention may be warranted to incorporate this relationship in environmental design.
... Besides, Study 2a complemented Study 1 by 1) detecting the mental association between healthy food and verticality in a task with visual vertical cues rather than linguistic vertical descriptions (Meier, Hauser, et al., 2007;2007b), and 2) controlling for valence in both the stimuli and the instructions (Lakens, 2012). Nevertheless, as can be seen in Fig. 3, due to technical reasons, the upper box was labeled "Box A" and the lower was labeled "Box B" in Study 2a, which could have confounded the effects of verticality. ...
... This opposite pattern could not be anticipated, since, to our knowledge, no previous research has ever explored the role of the same dispositional trait in the bidirectional effects of a given metaphor. Instead, past researchers focused on how individual differences predict the metaphorical congruency effects which are intrinsically symmetric and are not directional (e.g., Meier, Hauser, et al., 2007;2007b), or tested only one of the bidirectional effects (e.g., Fay & Maner, 2012). ...
Article
As expressed by the “Healthy is Up” metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory argues that the representation of health is commonly associated with high verticality because, typically, people stay upright when they are healthy whereas illness may force them to lie down. Along this line of argument, this research is the first to empirically explore the metaphorical representation of healthy food in terms of verticality. Across five experiments (N = 714), this article first demonstrates that people are faster to pair healthy food with up than down in an implicit association test (Study 1, supporting a metaphorical congruency effect). Then, it shows that people associate healthy food with high verticality and unhealthy food with low verticality by placing healthy food up high and unhealthy food low down along the vertical axis, and by preferring a food pyramid that depicts healthy food at the top rather than at the bottom (Studies 2a, 2b and 3, supporting an abstract-to-concrete effect). Last, this research finds that people judge a food product as healthier when it is pictured from an upward-looking angle than when it is pictured from a downward-looking angle (Study 4, supporting a concrete-to-abstract effect). Further analyses test the interaction between individual differences in self-control and the effects of the “Healthy is Up” metaphor in Studies 2a, 2b, 3 and 4. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.
... Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010;Landau, Zhong, & Awanson, 2018) asserts that people understand abstract domains via their knowledge from more concrete domains (e.g., knowledge of space). In other words, according to a metaphor-enriched perspective, people tend to use more concrete concepts to conceptualize abstract concepts either consciously or unconsciously (Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007;Xie et al., 2015). CMT holds that the way in which people encode, store, and retrieve information is grounded in metaphor, and an abstract concept is processed based on concrete objects by mapping (a precise set of correspondences) from a source domain to a target domain (Lakoff, 1993). ...
... Vertical spatial positioning is one of the most typical source domains among the multiple metaphorical associations (Cian, Krishna, & Schwarz, 2015;Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;Meier et al., 2007). Sufficient research has shown empirical evidence for a metaphorical association between the vertical spatial position and morality (Meier & Robinson, 2004;Hill & Lapsley, 2009). ...
... The vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts-and metaphors in general-have been studied from the embodiment perspective (e.g., Meier et al., 2007;Hill and Lapsley, 2009) since the publication of the two seminal works of Lakoff andJohnson (1980, 1999). According to the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), conceptual metaphorization occurs in a source domain consisting of concrete concepts we are familiar with (such as spatial orientations and physical entities) and a target domain comprising abstract concepts hard to understand or unfamiliar to us (such as time, morality). ...
... In line with the suggestion, most previous psychological studies on vertical spatial metaphor of morality have focused on its psychological reality and mapping, confirming "moral is up" and "immoral is down" (Meier et al., 2007;Wang and Lu, 2013) or just "moral is up" or "immoral is down" (Hill and Lapsley, 2009;Lawrence et al., 2011). Wang et al. (2016) found a strong implicit association between "moral is up" and "immoral is down" and a quicker response to "moral is up" in their Implicit Association Test (IAT) and ERP experiment. ...
Article
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A moral concept involves two main factors: moral cognition (indicated by morality) and emotion (indicated by emotionality). The cognitive mechanism underlying moral metaphors on the vertical dimension (e.g., moral-up, immoral-down) was investigated in three experiments using implicit association tests. The results of Experiment 1 show a stronger association of “moral-up, immoral-down” between words high in morality and vertical space than between words low in morality and vertical space, which indicates that cognitive factors of morality facilitate the processing of vertical spatial metaphors of moral concepts. Experiment 2, employing moral words different in emotionality, reveals a stronger association of “moral-up, immoral-down” between words high in emotionality and vertical space than between words low in emotionality and vertical space, which shows that emotional factors of morality facilitate the processing of vertical spatial metaphors of moral concepts. A comparison between the two experiments suggests a faster response to emotion than to moral cognition and similar association strengths of the two factors with verticality. Using words high in morality and emotionality, Experiment 3 shows that a combination of the two conditions (i.e., high morality and high emotionality) leads to a stronger tie with verticality than either condition. The above three experiments indicate that both moral cognition and emotion facilitate the processing of vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts, and the forces of the two, which jointly affect the metaphorical connection between morality and verticality, are basically equal, although the processing of emotionality is faster than that of morality.
... Expanding the concept of valence to morality, Meier, Sellbom, and Wygant (2007) found that people more quickly recognize words with a positive moral meaning (e.g., nurture, caring, charity, truthful, and trustworthy) when they appear toward the top of the screen. Conversely, they more quickly recognize words with a negative moral meaning (e.g., corrupt, dishonest, adultery, molest, and evil) when they appear toward the bottom of the screen. ...
... People rate strangers whose pictures appeared toward the top of the screen as being more religious. Meier, Sellbom, and Wygant (2007) People more quickly recognize words with a moral meaning when they appear toward the top of the screen (vs. down). ...
Article
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Verticality (the position of a physical object along the vertical dimension) is a basic aspect of human life. As such, it is co-opted for multiple metaphorical associations. In this review, building on the conceptual metaphor theory, we examine how the vertical dimension is metaphorically connected with critical constructs such as power, valence, concreteness, direction, and rationality/emotions, with important consequences for consumer experience and response. We introduce the verticality-manipulation taxonomy, which highlights new ways to think about the research on this topic. This taxonomy has five dimensions: the object’s verticality, the viewer’s verticality, the imagined verticality, the vertical associations, and the abstract domains. We then identify open issues and conflicting results in the current literature, and we indicate some insights for further research on this topic. We also summarize the key managerial implications arising from the wealth of research on this topic.
... Spatial metaphors refer to the way people often use familiar spatial concepts such as up and down, left and right, inside and outside, and far and near to represent certain abstract concepts [24], such as mapping concrete spatial relations to moral concepts. A researcher using the IAT asked participants to discriminate based on the nature of the presented words, and the results showed that the correct response rate was significantly higher and the response time significantly shorter when moral words were presented at the top of the screen and immoral words were presented at the bottom [25]. In another study, the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral metaphors on the vertical dimension was explored, and the results revealed a stronger association of "moral/up, immoral/down" when the emotionality of moral and immoral words was higher than when it was lower [26]. ...
Article
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The study of moral conceptual metaphors has been an important topic in recent years. In Chinese culture, the concepts of curvature and straightness are given certain semantic contents, in which curvature refers to being sly while straightness refers to having integrity. In the present study, we used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) paradigm (Experiment 1) and the Stroop paradigm (Experiment 2) to investigate whether there are metaphorical representations of curvature and straightness in moral concepts. The results revealed that the mean reaction time in compatible trials (i.e., moral words accompanied by a straight pattern and immoral words accompanied by a curved pattern) was significantly shorter than that in incompatible trials (i.e., moral words accompanied by a curved pattern and immoral words accompanied by a straight pattern). The Stroop paradigm showed that reaction times were significantly reduced when moral words were presented in a straight font, but there was no significant difference between the presentation of immoral words in a straight font and that in a curved font. The results suggest that mental representations of moral concepts are associated with straightness and curvature in Chinese culture.
... They permit us to construct one concept in terms of another highly structured and clearly defined concept. In contrast to previous research [72,73], our study employed distinct metaphorical ontologies and objects, which may be instructive for future consumer perception research. ...
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Packaging design is one of the most important visual representations of low-fat foods and is a key factor in the perception of the health of the product. The complexity of packaging induces the automatic processing of relevant concepts by consumers, which affects their attitudes; however, this process is not well understood. We developed a sequential mediation model based on the theories of conceptual fluency and conceptual metaphor to examine the impact of packaging complexity on consumers’ purchase intentions. In this study, 353 volunteers were recruited to participate, and variables were measured using questionnaires on packaging intention, brand complexity, concept fluency, and brand attitude. The results indicated that it was simple to increase consumers’ conceptual fluency and brand attitude; conceptual fluency had a significant predictive effect on brand attitude and purchase intention; brand attitude had a significant predictive effect on purchase intention and conceptual fluency; and brand attitude served as a mediator between packaging complexity and purchase intention. This study demonstrated that the general characteristics of packaging design could influence consumers’ purchase intentions and provide direction for the packaging design of low-fat foods. In addition, we examine the study’s theoretical and practical implications.
... People in a position of upright posture generate and recall positive thoughts more easily than those in a position of drooping posture (Wilson & Peper, 2004). People recognize words with a moral meaning more quickly when they appear toward the top (as opposed to the bottom) of the screen (Meier et al., 2007b). ...
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Empirical demonstrations of the embodied and grounded cognition approach, involving diverse areas and phenomena, have increased exponentially in recent years. However, little research has been done in the religious domain. To the best of our knowledge, no study based on this theoretical framework has explored spatial dimension in pictorial representation of the divine in children’s drawings or in religious art in general. The present study represents the very first attempt to investigate if and how spatiality is involved in the way children depict the divine in their drawings. Drawings collected from four groups of participants (n = 1156, ages 6–15) characterized by different cultural and religious environments: Japanese (Buddhism and Shinto), Russian-Buryat (Buddhism, Shamanism), Russian Slavic (Christian Orthodoxy), and French-speaking Swiss (Catholic and reformed Christianity) were annotated using the Gauntlet annotation tool and then analysed. The main result indicates that children from all four groups generally depict god (the centre of the annotated representation) in the upper part of their drawings. Further testing indicates that the type of composition (for instance, god depicted alone or as standing on the ground where the sky is also depicted) did not serve as a major influence on the child’s placement of god.
... 20 In addition, people more quickly identify words with a positive moral valence when they are at the top of a screen. 21 The same applies to the vertical position of "Godrelated" vs. "devil-related" words. 22 Meyers-Levey et al. found that rooms with high ceilings generate feelings of freedom, whereas those with low ceilings trigger thoughts of confinement. ...
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The pathogenesis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)-a disorder of gut-brain interaction that affects up to 10% of the world's population-remains uncertain. It is puzzling that a disorder so prevalent and archetypal among humans can be explained by disparate theories, respond to treatments with vastly different mechanisms of action, and present with a dazzling array of comorbidities. It is reasonable to question whether there is a unifying factor that binds these divergent theories and observations, and if so, what that factor might be. This article offers a testable hypothesis that seeks to accommodate the manifold theories, clinical symptoms, somatic comorbidities, neuropsychological features, and treatment outcomes of IBS by describing the syndrome in relation to a principal force of human evolution: gravity. In short, the hypothesis proposed here is that IBS may result from ineffective anatomical, physiological, and neuropsychological gravity management systems designed to optimize gastrointestinal form and function, protect somatic and visceral integrity, and maximize survival in a gravity-bound world. To explain this unconventional hypothesis of IBS pathogenesis, referred to herein as the gravity hypothesis, this article reviews the influence of gravity on human evolution; discusses how Homo sapiens imperfectly evolved to manage this universal force of attraction; and explores the mechanical, microbial, and neuropsychological consequences of gravity intolerance with a focus on explaining IBS. This article concludes by considering the diagnostic and therapeutic implications of this new hypothesis and proposes experiments to support or reject this line of inquiry. It is hoped that the ideas in this thought experiment may also help encourage new or different ways of thinking about this common disorder.
... In cognitive linguistics, morality is often vertically construed, as evidenced by the conceptual metaphors MORAL IS UP, IMMORAL IS DOWN (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1999;Meier et al. 2007). In this paper we use the terms of moral high ground and moral low ground, which can be assumed by a discourse participant, and we take them to correspond to the moral foundations described above, where one of the polarities would correspond to a moral high ground (care/fairness/loyalty/authority/sanctity) and the other one would correspond to a moral low ground (harm/cheating/betrayal/subversion/degradation). ...
Article
This paper studies how readers respond to a counterfactual request inviting them to imagine themselves in the shoes of an immigrant in a corpus of online reader comments to a Yahoo article on Latino immigration. We initially considered 7,000 comments and for our corpus and analysis selected those in which the commenters perform a deictic shift, i.e. assume the deictic center of the immigrant using the first-person pronoun I and the adjective my, which totalled to 452 comments. The discourse of the comments, however, turned out to be very moralizing – i.e. while managing to assume the spatial and the temporal position of the immigrants, they refused to share the same moral grounds as them, which resulted in a series of I would… and I would never… propositions, which frame the commenters as vastly morally superior to the immigrants. The commenters occupy the legality, good parenting, patriotism and gratitude moral high grounds and often revert to moral grandstanding.
... The systematic use of vertical space when expressing religious contents is not merely an artistic feature but rather reflects a strategy of knowledge representation. According to the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, verticality is a basic aspect of human life, and is therefore co-opted for various metaphorical associations such as valence, power, numerosity, or religious values (Hartmann et al., 2012;Meier et al., 2007b;Meier & Robinson, 2004;Schubert, 2005). This means that abstract and often not directly experienceable concepts are represented by concrete sensory experiences (e.g., Barsalou, 2008;Cian, 2017). ...
Article
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Most Christians in Western cultures associate God with upper space and devil with lower space. Measuring this spatial association captures the implicit metaphorical representations of religious concepts. Previous studies have shown that implicit measurements of the belief in God increase when people are confronted with their own mortality. Here we investigated the effect of mortality salience on implicit metaphorical representations of religiosity. Using a repeated measurement design, we found that implicit associations between God-up and devil-down increase when people think about their own death, but not when they think about a tooth treatment (control condition). The effect was moderated by self-esteem; only people with low and medium self-esteem were influenced by mortality salience. Our results show that mortality salience automatically activates religious contents and their cognitive representations that embody these abstract contents.
... In the previous literature of metaphoric phenomena, ethical judgment has been significantly associated with the environment or bodily factors such as vertical position (Meier et al., 2007), brightness (Banerjee et al., 2012), color (Zarkadi & Schnall, 2013), psychological distance (van Dijke et al., 2017), body cleanliness (Zhong et al., 2010) and some particular tastes (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014). Our observation is along the line with the previous literature, but extended with the study performed in the Chinese cultural background. ...
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A growing body of evidence suggests that taste is not only an essential physical experience, but also an embodied cue of evaluation. The embodied gustatory experiences may affect ethical evaluation. However, it remains unclear how different forms of taste, such as the word sweet, the sweet food image and the actual sweet taste, are associated with ethical evaluation. Does the visual food taste have a priming effect on the moral-terms evaluation? Does the actual gustatory taste influence the ethical processing similarly to the taste images? All the questions will be answered by the three experiments introduced in this paper. Experiment 1 was to test the implicit association between taste words and ethical words. Experiments 2 and 3 were to test the prime-effect of the food image and the actual gustatory perception on ethical evaluation. The results supported our hypothesis that sweet taste words were strongly associated with moral words and bitter taste words with immoral words. Regarding the priming effect, food images and actual gustatory taste lead to different modifications of ethical evaluation. With food image priming, the bitter taste pictures up-regulated the ethical ratings, i.e., the moral phrases were rated more positive, and the immoral phrases were rated less negative, compared with sweet taste images. On the other hand, with actual taste priming, the sweet stimulation could indeed up-regulate the ethical ratings compared with the bitter stimulation. Such a seemingly conflicting influence of different forms of taste on moral evaluation is further considered.
... For instance, in several studies, they examined the influence of the conceptual metaphor "GOOD IS UP" on understanding some abstract concepts related to ethical matters/issues by adopting reaction time tasks. They proved that when moral concepts are presented to subjects in the upper (as opposed to lower) vertical position, the subjects will decode and recognize these concepts at a faster rate rather than the time they are presented in the lower position (Meier et al., 2007). The other category of research is the studies that deal with the comparisons of the metaphorical perception of concepts with that of non-metaphorical concepts equivalent to them. ...
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The modality of apprehension and processing of metaphorical expressions in comparison with non-metaphorical ones has hitherto captivated numerous researchers in manifold fields of study, such as linguistics, psychology, and cognitive sciences. More specially, metaphors used in a one-sentence paragraph have been the subjects of many studies. However, cognitive functions of structural metaphors haven’t been entirely noteworthy in contrast with non-metaphorical expressions employed in textual context. In this study, the interrelationship between memory and conceptual metaphor in significant cognitive processes has been examined in a textual context. In this respect, the hypothesis, that conceptual metaphor as a value can assist with the recognition and recollection process and incorporate the quintessence of our cerebrations, has been put to test. To evaluate this assumption, the reaction time task is used. Each testable case has been subjected to analysis within two analogous contexts, in a metaphorical and non-metaphorical manner. Afterwards, terms were displayed, and the subjects needed to determine as swiftly as possible whether these vocabularies were exemplified or not. The results indicated that the terms pertaining to the schema and other terms included in metaphorical context would be processed faster than the one with non-metaphorical context. With regard to the obtained data, it seems that the conceptual metaphor generates semantic networks in the mind which will be more accessible to memory upon information retrieval.
... Empirically, this is the case. Meier and Robinson (2004, Experiment 1; see also Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007) found that positive words were evaluated faster when presented at the top of the computer screen, above a fixation point, whereas negative words were evaluated faster when presented at the bottom of the screen, below the fixation point. Moreover, exposure to a positive word in the middle of the screen facilitated the subsequent identification of a neutral visual stimulus shown in the upper region of the screen, whereas exposure to a negative word did so for stimuli shown in the lower region of the screen (Meier & Robinson, 2004, Experiment 2). ...
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In everyday language, abstract concepts are described in terms of concrete physical experiences (e.g., good things are “up”; the past is “behind” us). Stimuli congruent with such conceptual metaphors are processed faster than stimuli that are not. Since ease of processing enhances aesthetic pleasure, stimuli should be perceived as more pleasing when their presentation matches (rather than mismatches) the metaphorical mapping. In six experiments, speakers of English (Experiment 1-3a) and Farsi (Experiment 3b and 4) viewed valence- and time-related photos in arrangements congruent and incongruent with their metaphorical mapping. Consistent with the valence-verticality metaphor in both languages, English and Farsi speakers preferred visual arrangements that placed the happy photo above the sad photo. In contrast, participants’ preferences for time-related photos were moderated by the direction of writing. English speakers, who write from left to right, preferred arrangements that placed past-themed photos to the left of modern-themed photos; this was not observed for Farsi speakers, who write from right to left as well as left to right. In sum, identical stimuli enjoy an aesthetic advantage when their spatial arrangement matches the spatial ordering implied by applicable conceptual metaphors.
... Consider, for instance, expressions such as: "to have high standards", "to be upright", "to be underhanded" or "falling from grace" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). These metaphors express the "virtue is up" or "vice is down" mappings and illustrate that the vertical dimension is employed to infer moral virtue or vice (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007b). ...
Article
This article examines vertical dimension as a metaphorical representation of ethical consumption by testing the connection between ethical consumption and high verticality, and its implications for consumers when considering fair-trade products. This research first shows that the representation of ethical consumption in terms of high verticality manifests in a strong implicit association between moral virtues underpinning fair-trade consumption (e.g., justice, solidarity) and “up” (Study 1). This research then demonstrates that consumers explicitly associate fair-trade products with an elevated position (Study 2), and that a match between fair-trade products and increased physical elevation results in heightened altruistic behavior (Study 3). In addition, this article reveals that greater familiarity with fair-trade products enhances this metaphorical representation and its downstream effects on altruistic behavior (Studies 2 and 3). The theoretical and managerial implications of the present research are discussed in conclusion.
... Consider, for instance, expressions such as: "to have high standards", "to be upright", "to be underhanded" or "falling from grace" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). These metaphors express the "virtue is up" or "vice is down" mappings and illustrate that the vertical dimension is employed to infer moral virtue or vice (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007b). ...
Preprint
This article examines vertical dimension as a metaphorical representation of ethical consumption by testing the connection between ethical consumption and high verticality, and its implications for consumers when considering fair-trade products. This research first shows that the representation of ethical consumption in terms of high verticality manifests in a strong implicit association between moral virtues underpinning fair-trade consumption (e.g., justice, solidarity) and "up" (Study 1). This research then demonstrates that consumers explicitly associate fair-trade products with an elevated position (Study 2), and that a match between fair-trade products and increased physical elevation results in heightened altruistic behavior (Study 3). In addition, this article reveals that greater familiarity with fair-trade products enhances this metaphorical representation and its downstream effects on altruistic behavior (Studies 2 and 3). The theoretical and managerial implications of the present research are discussed in conclusion.
... For example, words with a positive valence are categorized more rapidly when presented at the top of the screen (as compared to when they are presented at the bottom) and responses to words with negative valence are responded to more quickly when the word happens to be presented at the bottom of the screen (as compared to the top) (Meier and Robinson, 2004). Metaphor congruency effects have been demonstrated across a range of conceptual and perceptual representations in binary classification tasks discriminating between moral and immoral terms (Meier et al., 2007), and power vs. powerlessness (Schubert, 2005). Links in conceptual and perceptual representations have also been observed with both visual stimuli (Dehaene et al., 1993;Fias et al., 2001;Fischer, 2003;Nuerk et al., 2004) and across vision and audition (e.g., Rusconi et al., 2006). ...
Article
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Linking arbitrary shapes (e.g., circles, squares, and triangles) to personal labels (e.g., self, friend, or stranger) or reward values (e.g., £18, £6, or £2) results in immediate processing benefits for those stimuli that happen to be associated with the self or high rewards in perceptual matching tasks. Here we further explored how social and reward associations interact with multisensory stimuli by pairing labels and objects with tones (low, medium, and high tones). We also investigated whether self and reward biases persist for multisensory stimuli with the label removed after an association had been made. Both high reward stimuli and those associated with the self, resulted in faster responses and improved discriminability (i.e., higher d'), which persisted for multisensory stimuli even when the labels were removed. However, these self-and reward-biases partly depended on the specific alignment between the physical tones (low, medium, and high) and the conceptual (social or reward) order. Performance for reward associations improved when the endpoints of low or high rewards were paired with low or high tones; meanwhile, for personal associations, there was a benefit when the self was paired with either low or high tones, but there was no effect when the stranger was associated with either endpoint. These results indicate that, unlike reward, social personal associations are not represented along a continuum with two marked endpoints (i.e., self and stranger) but rather with a single reference point (the self vs. other).
... For example, words with a positive valence are categorized more rapidly when presented at the top of the screen (as compared to when they are presented at the bottom) and responses to words with negative valence are responded to more quickly when the word happens to be presented at the bottom of the screen (as compared to the top) (Meier & Robinson, 2004). Metaphor congruency effects have been demonstrated across a range of conceptual and perceptual representations in binary classification tasks discriminating between moral and immoral terms (Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007), and power vs. ...
Preprint
Linking arbitrary shapes (e.g., circles, squares, and triangles) to personal labels (e.g., self, friend, or stranger) or reward values (e.g., £18, £6, or £2) results in immediate processing benefits for those stimuli that happen to be associated with the self or high rewards in perceptual matching tasks. Here we further explored how social and reward associations interact with multisensory stimuli by pairing labels and objects with tones (low, medium, and high tones). We also investigated whether self and reward biases persist for multisensory stimuli with the label removed after an association had been made. Both high reward stimuli and those associated with the self, resulted in faster responses and improved discriminability (i.e., higher d'), which persisted for multisensory stimuli even when the labels were removed. However, these self- and reward-biases partly depended on the specific alignment between the physical tones (low, medium, and high) and the conceptual (social or reward) order. Performance for reward associations improved when the endpoints of low or high rewards were paired with low or high tones; meanwhile, for personal associations, there was a benefit when the self was paired with either low or high tones, but there was no effect when the stranger was associated with either endpoint. These results indicate that, unlike reward, social personal associations are not represented along a continuum with two marked endpoints (i.e., self and stranger) but rather with a single reference point (the self vs. other).
... Additionally, as demonstrated by Meier, Sellbom and Wygant (2007), a stimulus placed in the upper part of the visual field will convey morality to a greater extent compared to when it is located at the bottom, although the relation does not appear to be mapped by individuals who lack moral consideration. ...
Thesis
Several studies in past lines of research have demonstrated the detrimental impact of derogatory terms, epithets and slurs on stereotyping and prejudice towards minorities. In an attempt to broaden previous findings, we investigated the influence of positive labels attributed to the majority group on the perception on a minority group member. Primarily, we anticipated that the use of the label “straight”, rather than “heterosexual”, might convey an implicit, strong association between the social majority group and a sense of moral rectitude, which might prompt a negative response to homosexual men. In order to test the hypothesis, we conducted two experimental studies involving heterosexual subjects, where a social majority target was presented as “straight” (vs. “heterosexual”); next, we assessed participants’ attitudes towards a minority-group representative social target (i.e., a homosexual male). The analysis revealed a negative effect of the label “straight” on attitudes towards the minority group member only for strongly religious individuals.
... The divine is up and the profane is down (Meier, Hauser, et al., 2007). The Moral is up and the immoral is down (Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007) and heroes face right (Frimer & Sinclair, 2016). A metaphorical representation of honor as up-right can be found in a number of languages. ...
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Full-text available
Honor is abstract. We predict that people make sense of honor metaphorically as an up–right position in space and that endorsing honor values makes this metaphor more accessible. Supporting our prediction, people in China (Study 1) and the United States (Studies 1–4) associate honor with up and right and dishonor with down and left, controlling for the association of positive with up–right (Studies 3, 4). We document downstream consequences for choice and perception of this metaphoric representation. Regarding choice, Americans who endorse honor values and voted for then-candidate Trump prefer photographs in which President Trump is positioned in the up–right quadrant (Study 5). Images from conservative news websites position the President’s face in the up–right quadrant more than nonconservative ones (Study 6). Regarding perception, Americans who rate President Trump as honorable are more likely to perceive him as facing up and to the right in news website images (Study 7).
... We created two menu versions for each framing condition (see an example in Fig. 1), one in which the vegetarian dishes were on top (UP version) and one in which they were at the bottom (DOWN version)-a participant allocated to each condition could receive either of the two versions using random assignment. We did this because research showed that menu positions can influence food choices (Dayan & Bar-Hillel, 2011) and that people may process morality-related concepts differently when these are displayed up versus down (Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007). We therefore wanted to ensure that the effects of our interventions are not dependent ...
Article
Research suggests that consuming vegetarian foods is one of the key lifestyle changes that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, transforming dietary habits to counter climate change has received little attention to date compared to other green behaviors. In three large pre-registered online studies conducted on 11,066 US participants, the present research tested whether reframing the name of the vegetarian food category impacts the choice of dishes from this category in the context of restaurant menus. We showed that a pro-environmental frame (i.e. “Environmentally Friendly Main Courses for a Happy Planet”), a social frame (i.e. “Refreshing Main Courses for Relaxing Conversations”), and a neutral frame (i.e. vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes mixed in the same section “Main Courses”) all increased the likelihood of vegetarian choice compared to a vegetarian frame (i.e. “Vegetarian Main Courses”). Given that either of the three framing conditions (vs. the vegetarian frame) increased vegetarian food choice but no consistent differences emerged among them, the main message of the present research is that the absence of vegetarian framing, regardless of the alternative intervention, may make vegetarian choices more likely. In addition to testing the main effects of menus on vegetarian choice, we comprehensively examined the mechanism behind these effects by probing multiple mediators. Overall, our research offers new insights into how techniques stemming from psychology can enhance vegetarian food choice.
... A consistent predictor of ongoing aggression and violence is the failure to engage with the self-relevant consequences of one's own actions (Bandura, Underwood, & Fromson, 1975;Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). This has also long been considered a core feature of psychopathy (Hare, 2003;Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007;Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009), where psychopaths tend to blame their victims for the negative consequences of their behavior (Hare, 1996). Selfdehumanization for perpetrators may serve to limit rather than motivate subsequent acts of violence or harm and to reconnect perpetrators back into their human community through motiving pro-social acts. ...
Article
The investment model of close relationships has focused on satisfaction and dependence (as it pertains to viable alternatives) as important indicators of relationship commitment and success. In this review, I apply a dehumanization perspective to understanding why abusive relationships can increase dependence in the context of low relationship satisfaction. I will argue that abusive relationships are likely to continue when (a) perpetrators of abuse fail to self-dehumanize, but continue to dehumanize their partner; (b) victimized partners self-dehumanize, but fail to dehumanize the perpetrator of their abuse; and (c) third-party observers dehumanize victimized partners. This pattern of dehumanization facilitates dependence due to a tendency for (a) perpetrators and victims to justify ongoing abusive behavior, (b) victimized partners to view themselves as unworthy of available relationship alternatives or incapable of developing economic alternatives, and (c) third-party observers to downgrade the social value of victims. Finally, I will review potential precipitators of these dynamics, drawing from research on Dark Triad traits to understand the longer term conditions under which dehumanizing processes may contribute to high levels of dependence under conditions of low levels of satisfaction. Applying a dehumanization perspective to abusive behavior within close relationships opens new lines of inquiry and provides an alternative framework for understanding how people may become entrapped and vulnerable in relationships where maltreatment persists.
... Some studies have reported the individual difference of metaphorical processing such as metaphor usage (Fetterman, Bair, Werth, Landkammer, & Robinson, 2016), personality trait (Meier & Robinson, 2006;Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007b) and psychological disorder (Meier & Robinson, 2006). However, in our knowledge, there was no study which investigates the effect of social anxiety on the metaphorical associations. ...
Article
Background and objectives: Individuals with social anxiety have various types of deficiencies in emotional processing. Diversity of deficiencies may imply that socially anxious individuals have malfunctions in fundamental parts of emotional processing. Therefore, we hypothesized that social anxiety contributes to deficiencies in building on the metaphorical relationship between emotional experience and brightness. Methods: We conducted a judgment task of valences of faces with manipulated clothing brightness (bright or dark). Results: A congruency effect between the emotional valence and clothing brightness was observed in participants with low social anxiety. However, this pattern was not found in participants with high social anxiety. The results suggested that a deficiency in metaphorical associations leads to maladaptive emotional processing in individuals with social anxiety. Limitations: Our findings cannot be directly generalized to clinical populations. Such populations should be tested in the future studies. Conclusions: We may expand Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) conceptual metaphor theory by showing the relationships between social anxiety and malfunction in metaphorical processing. Malfunctions in metaphorical processing could lead to various types of psychological disorders which have deficiencies in emotional processing.
... Scholars have examined the concept of high and low in vertical space, and their associated metaphors, in limited contexts, especially in a Chinese setting. Most vertical metaphor research focuses on emotion (Lv & Lu, 2013;Meier & Robinson, 2004), morality (Jiang & Jiang, 2016;Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007;Wang & Lu, 2013), and power (Dong, 2015;Schubert, 2005;Slepian, Masicampo, & Ambady, 2015). Humans rely on vertical spatial mappings to describe concepts, which can be seen in everyday life (Goodhew, McGaw, & Kidd, 2014). ...
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Understanding product packaging of consumer goods, especially the food and drink category, continues to be vitally important as more and more product options abound. Thus, the present research explores the role of brand logo location on consumers’ perceptions of a product. Utilizing conceptual metaphor theory, we seek to understand the impact of brand logo locations in two unique studies. Study 1 examines effects of brand logo location and positive and negative product descriptors on consumer reaction times via the Stroop task. The findings suggest that consumers evaluate positive words more quickly when they are positioned higher, however there is no significant difference for negative words. Study 2 seeks to increase the realism by introducing products in an online environment into the experiment and altering the variables under study. The results suggest that purchase intentions and willingness to recommend a product are influenced by the brand logo location, due to the indirect effect of perceived quality. Thus, brands that are able to position the brand logo higher on the packaging, regardless of brand familiarity, are likely to have more favorable perceptions.
... For this purpose, a relevant example of spatial metaphor is verticality, often adopted in the common language to differentiate what is good from what is bad. Meier, Sellbom, and Wygant (2007) found that participants recognized moral words faster when paired with upper visual cues or when presented in a high vertical location. Hill and Lapsley (2009) revealed that immoral personality traits are encoded more slowly when they are located high in the visual field. ...
Article
Abundant literature in cognitive sciences has shown that morality is grounded in bodily experience. Four studies tested the perceptual association between the spatial dimension of straightness and the abstract concept of morality. Study 1 (n = 61) employed an IAT and revealed an association between straight figures and moral related words. Study 2 (n = 83) employed a similar paradigm and further revealed that the effect we found in Study 1 cannot be attributable to the general association between straight figures and positivity. Study 3 (n = 64) revealed that participants showed a stronger preference for straight figures after recalling moral (vs. immoral) deeds. Study 4 (n = 183) showed the specific role of morality, in this sense, as recalling sociable (vs. unsociable) deeds had no significant influence on figure preferences. A small-scale meta-analysis confirmed the robustness of our findings. Results are discussed in light of the embodiment theory.
... Metaphors linking spatial location and affect (or the spacevalence metaphor) have long been the subject of research. [17][18][19]30 Other orientational metaphors have been investigated as well, such as those of morality, 31 power, 32 and hierarchy. 33 Contrary to those, spatial metaphors have been little explored in relation to conversion or somatoform disorders. ...
Article
Background Conversion disorder (CD) is a largely enigmatic disorder, one that requires a thorough ruling-out process. Prior research suggests that metaphors and conceptualization are rooted in physical experience, and that we interpret our affective world through metaphors. Spatial metaphors (interaction of affect and vertical space) are a prominent example of the grounding of metaphors. This is a relatively unpaved direction of research of CD. Objectives The present pilot study sought to explore this view by investigating the ‘healthy is up, sick is down′ spatial metaphors (e.g. ‘fell ill′, ‘top shape′) in patients with CD, examining the correlation between the processing of bodily-related words, CD and vertical space. We hypothesized that patients with CD, who experience their bodies as ill, will demonstrate a downwards bias when processing bodily-related words; corresponding to the ‘healthy is up, sick is down′ spatial metaphor. Methods 8 female patients (ages M-38.13 SD-10.44) and 42 female controls (ages M-36.4 SD-14.57) performed a visual attention task. Participants were asked to identify a spatial probe at the top or the bottom of a screen, following either a bodily-related (e.g. arm) or non-bodily related (e.g. clock) prime word. Results As predicted, when processing bodily-related words, patients with CD demonstrated a downwards attention bias. Moreover, the higher the patient′s level of somatization, the faster that patient detected lower (vs. upper) spatial targets. Conclusions The study suggests that the changed health paradigm of patients with CD is grounded in sensorimotor perception. Further research could propose new diagnostic and treatment options of CD.
... In one experiment, Meier and colleagues found that people encode God-related concepts faster if they were shown in a higher vertical position. In another experiment, Meier, Sellbom, and Wygant (2007) found that people have an implicit associations between morality and up, and immorality and down. Research also showed that people tend to be faster at recognizing positive words when presented toward the top of a computer monitor (Meier & Robinson, 2004) and are more likely to represent positive words using lines that have upward orientation as compared to negative words (Lundholm, 1921). ...
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Inspired by the work of the great aestheticians of the 1700s and modern psychological work in spatial cognition, we sought to test the bidirectional relationship between spatial magnitudes and aesthetic value. In a series of 5 experiments, we show that changing the size and position of a painting can impact judgments of its aesthetic value, and conversely. The same painting is believed to be larger when presented as a master artist’s versus as a student’s work (Experiment 1). Increasing the size of painting makes it seem better (Experiment 2). A painting presented as a master’s work appears larger, closer, and better than when presented as a fake (Experiment 3). Master artists’ paintings are recommended to be placed higher on the wall than students’ paintings (Experiment 4). Finally, when hung high, a painting is judged better than when it is presented at eye level, and worse when it is presented below eye level (Experiment 5). Together these findings demonstrate a reciprocal relationship between the greatness of a work and its spatial position and scale.
... Recall that in the present paradigm faces could appear either on top or bottom of the screen. Recent studies have shown that categorizations of concepts such as powerful and powerless (Schubert, 2005), or moral and immoral (Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007) are influenced by their vertical position on the screen (Lakens, 2012). There are good reasons to believe that social categories are associated with various stereotypes of power, morality, and strength. ...
Article
A series of five experiments investigated the binding of social categories (e.g., sex, race, and age) and non-facial attributes (e.g., spatial location and response) in unfamiliar faces. Evidence for the creation and retrieval of temporary , short-term memory structures, across perception and action has been adduced. The binary bindings documented here (e.g., sex and race, race and spatial location) were indicated by partial repetition costs, in which repeating a pair of social categories or altering them altogether led to faster responses than repeating or alternating only one of them. These episodic structures, dubbed herein " face files " , consisted of both visuo–visuo and visuo–motor integrations. Their presence suggests that sets of binary social categories in unfamiliar faces are extracted simultaneously and retrieved together automatically. The implications of these results for theories of person construal and social cognition are discussed.
... Secondly, high verticality has been associated with many different psychological Schubert, 2005), morality (Lakens, 2012;Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007), and divinity (Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007). This offers several alternative explanations of the previous results: for instance, the person at 160° angular disparity might be perceived as more powerful and this made his opinion seem more important for the participants. ...
Thesis
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„Perspective-taking“ is the ability to put yourself into the place of somebody else. Psychological research distinguishes three kinds of perspective-taking, namely, perceptual (visuo-spatial), affective (empathy), and cognitive (theory of mind) perspective-taking. The last two kinds of perspective-taking are often summarized as “psychological perspective-taking”. This dissertation tackles the question of whether these three kinds of perspective-taking should be conceptualized as independent constructs or as facets of one and the same construct. Prior research findings concerning this are equivocal. While some authors consider correlations between the different kinds of perspective-taking as too low for a unitary construct, others interpret correlations of the same magnitude as evidence for this. A less arbitrary way of deciding this would be to identify common mechanisms that underlie all kinds of perspective-taking and to examine whether manipulating these mechanisms in psychological experiments affects measures of perceptual, affective, and cognitive perspective-taking in parallel. In accordance with this reasoning, the present dissertation assumes that the mental self-rotation of the body schema into the physical location of another person, the main mechanism of perceptual perspective-taking, is a common mechanism of all kinds of perspective-taking. Thus, contrary to previous research a unitary construct is not only justified on the grounds of a common central functionality of all kinds of perspective-taking, that is, overcoming one’s egocentrism in favor of an alternative (perceptual, affective or cognitive) point of view, but additionally on the grounds of a common psychological mechanism. From this, the simple hypothesis that inducing visuo-spatial perspective-taking also leads to psychological consequences is derived. This hypothesis was tested in 6 experiments. In these experiments, participants first had to adopt the visual perspective of another person. To this end, they saw a person sitting at a table with two objects. During every trial, participants had to decide which hand the person would have to use in order to grab one of the two objects. Furthermore, the angular disparity between the participant and the target was manipulated in such a way that during half of the trials the target person was within the same visuo-spatial reference frame as the participant and thus no perspective-taking was necessary to solve the task correctly. During the remaining trials, the target person was sitting in another visuo-spatial reference frame so that the participants had to engage in perspective-taking to solve the task correctly. After every such trial, the target person was imbued with a mental state. This was done using an adapted paradigm for the investigation of the anchoring heuristic. Specifically, participants were asked to answer a trivia question and also saw what the target person from the visuo-spatial perspective-taking task was guessing. In line with the hypothesis that visuo-spatial perspective-taking leads to psychological outcomes, too, it was found that participants adopted the thoughts of the target person more strongly after visuo-spatial perspective-taking. This was evident in the absolute size of the anchoring effect, as well as the differences between participant and target estimations. Further experiments ruled out sample and stimulus characteristics and task difficulty as alternative explanations for these effects. The last two experiments furthermore established that the effects were specific to constellations where an embodied self-rotation into the target’s perspective was necessary and that the adoption of the target’s thoughts was associated with feelings of similarity. Taken together, these findings support the theoretically elaborated unitary view of perspective-taking and furthermore distinguish this construct from other related phenomena. In the general discussion, the significance of these findings for research on empathy, theory of mind, and perspective-taking, as well as practical implications are discussed.
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Drawing on the social cognitive chain of being (SCCB) theory and heuristic perspective, the present study explored whether and how social targets’ vertical spatial position influences the help the social targets can get from others. Study 1 demonstrated that individuals would be more likely to help social targets who were presented on a higher vertical spatial position than those who were presented on a lower vertical spatial position. In Study 2, an experimental-causal-chain design was adopted for further testing the mediating role of moral reputation between the social targets’ vertical spatial position and the amount of help that the social targets obtain from others. Study 3 cross-validated this mediating process by a measurement-of-mediation design. Those three studies help us comprehend how helping behavior occurs from the characteristics of help recipients as well as extend the influence of vertical spatial metaphor of morality from cognitive connection to action-relevant outcomes.
Article
Most metaphors are highly conventionalized expressions that are typically read and understood by native speakers effortlessly. For instance, while reading the brightest child in the classroom native speakers naturally understand that the speaker is not referring to a child who is literally shiny, but rather, a smart child. Non-native speakers and language learners, however, may find some metaphoric expressions difficult to understand, if expressed in a language that they do not master fluently. Moreover, they may try to use conventional metaphoric expressions translated directly from their own native or first language, into another language. This can create problems in intercultural settings, where the expression may sound unheard before, and possibly unclear. For instance, the arguably unclear expression climbing up on mirrors is actually a direct translation of a highly conventional Italian metaphoric expression, frequently used to say “finding excuses”. In this chapter I elaborate on the way in which metaphoric expressions are understood, and how such comprehension processes vary in relation with metaphor conventionality, aptness and deliberateness. I then take these observations into the field of intercultural communication, explaining how the pragmatics of metaphor comprehension may be affected by intercultural settings.
Article
This research shows that vertical versus horizontal presentation of choices influence decision‐making differently. Based on the existing research on construal priming, this research hypothesizes and shows that vertical (vs. horizontal) choice presentation primes a stronger concrete (vs. abstract) construal, and that this systematically affects consumption choices. Across a series of four studies, we show that the stronger concrete (vs. abstract) construal priming by vertical (vs. horizontal) choice presentation results in a greater perceived importance of price (vs. quality) and secondary (vs. primary) choice attributes while making consumption choices. Contributions emerge for literatures on construal priming and contextual framing, and for managerial practice.
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This work presents two theoretical challenges to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The first argument shows CMT’s foundational Conceptual Claim—that abstract concepts are necessarily structured by concrete concepts—entails the blurring of the literal–figurative distinction, which calls into question the legitimacy of standard methods of metaphor identification used in CMT. The second argument aims at the Linguistic Claim—that conceptual metaphors are necessary for metaphorical language—by showing that conceptual metaphors are neither necessary nor sufficient for linguistic metaphors and that, therefore, the existence of conceptual metaphors cannot be validly inferred from the presence of their linguistic counterparts. In light of the arguments put forward, the CMT theorist is forced to accept one of four options: (A) hold on to both the Conceptual Claim and Linguistic Claim, by adequately addressing problems presented here, (B) discard the Conceptual Claim and give up the theory, (C) discard both claims and give up the theory, or (D) accept the Conceptual Claim but reject the Linguistic Claim and abandon the methods of discovering conceptual metaphors through analysis of figurative language. I argue that the only tenable option is D.
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采用不同的研究方法考察道德概念的垂直空间隐喻表征, 及其对于人的认知的影响。实验 1 采用迫选法, 在明确要求被试把道德词放在垂直空间位置的上方或下方时, 发现在意识层面, 被试倾向于把道德词放在垂直空间的上部, 把不道德词放在垂直空间的下部。实验 2 采用无关任务法, 对实验词语作褒贬义判断, 实验结果发现, 道德词出现在空间的上方(相对于下方)时, 被试对道德词作褒贬义判断的时间短; 不道德词出现在空间的下方(相对于上方)时, 被试作褒贬义判断的时间则短。实验 3 通过记忆任务发现, 道德概念的启动使得个体高估了相继出现的客体的高度和长度, 不道德概念的启动使得个体低估了其高度和长度。三个实验的结果表明, 汉语道德概念的垂直空间隐喻具有心理现实性; 汉语道德概念的垂直空间隐喻既存在于无意识层面又可以在意识的层面显现; 汉语道德概念的垂直空间隐喻表征会影响对物体的高度和长度的估计, 表现为汉语道德概念隐喻表征的“认知偏移效应”。
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What influences how people render their moral judgment? Focusing specifically on the conceptual metaphors “ moral is upright ” and “ immoral is tilted ”, we sought to investigate whether physical slant can influence people’s harsh moral judgment. Experiment 1 induced physical slant by having participants complete the questionnaire at a tilt table. We observed a significant effect with participants who experienced physical slant rendering a less severe moral judgment than did those who wrote their responses at a level table. Using a new manipulation of physical slant and a larger, more diverse sample, Experiment 2 asked participants to complete the questionnaires with rotated text or normal text. We observed a difference between the two groups: compared to participants who read the normal text, those with a visual experience of slant lessened the severity of their moral judgments. Taken together, the results showed that the consequence of tilted experience exerts downstream effects on moral reasoning, which suggests that incidental bodily experience affects how people render their decisions.
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Cambridge Core - Cognition - Metaphors in the Mind - by Jeannette Littlemore
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Human-computer interactions keep changing the way humans experience the world, yet the underlying mechanism for such interactions remains obscure. As humans’ bodily experiences play an important role in cognition, the current study designed three experiments to investigate whether individuals with different extent of internet use experience would perform differently in a lexical decision task in which words related to body movement in different ways were used as stimuli. All the experiments were conducted in a five-step sequence: the lexical decision pre-test, the body representation pre-measurement, the tool-use training, the body representation post-measurement, and the lexical decision post-test. The participants with high (N = 32 in Exp. 1, N = 20 in Exp. 2, N = 18 in Exp. 3, respectively) or low (N = 28 in Exp. 1, N = 23 in Exp. 2, N = 22 in Exp. 3) level of internet-use experience were recruited. The results of the study revealed that both groups of the participants performed differently in a lexical decision task when the words used in the task were action verbs or nouns which refer to the tools used in the immediate space of the body, but not when words included metaphorical orientation information related to body movement. This study provided further empirical evidence for the impact of internet use experience on individual's conceptual processing via body representation changes.
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Ethical dilemmas are common. Just as commonly, however, these motivational conflicts are overlooked or actively avoided in behavioral decision making. Raising awareness of the ethical implications of action can be a powerful route to changing behavior, yet this approach also risks defensive responding and the potential for backfire effects. Current models of behavior change are not well equipped to predict how people respond to behavior change interventions which seek to make salient ethical conflict. Drawing on research in the field of behavioral ethics, I detail why models of behavior change need to account for defensive responding when people are confronted with their own ethical conflicts. Furthermore, failing to understand the role of this motivated resistance leaves open the possibility of increased commitment to, rather than attempts to change, ethically troublesome behavior. In this review, I will focus my analysis on the issue of meat‐eating. Most people eat meat, yet many of these same individuals also experience ethical conflict around their meat‐consumption. Drawing on dissonance theorizing, I present an overview of the pressure points where behavior can be challenged on ethical grounds, the various strategies that individuals may use to avoid change, and ideas on how best to achieve change while also avoiding motivated resistance. This analysis will provide a working model for policymakers to understand how to design effective behavior change campaigns that draw on the power of ethical arguments while also avoiding the possibility of motivated resistance.
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Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - Meaning in English - by Javier Valenzuela
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Although the evolution of psychopathy as a formal clinical disorder began more than a century ago, it is only recently that scientifically sound psychometric procedures for its assessment have become available. The result has been a sharp increase in theoretically meaningful and replicable research findings, both in applied settings and in the laboratory. The construct of psychopathy is proving to be particularly useful in the criminal justice system, where it has important implications for sentencing, diversion, placement, and treatment options and for the assessment of risk for recidivism and violence. Although the etiology of the predatory, cold-blooded nature of psychopathy remains obscure, the theories and methods of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral genetics promise to greatly increase our understanding of this disorder.
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This reply to D. L. Meyer (see record 1992-03999-001) explains again that cell means, although usually the result of greatest interest, should not be confused with interaction effects. Unless all main effects are 0, one cannot accurately interpret an interaction by plotting the cell means. To interpret an interaction, it is the residuals remaining after removal of constituent effects (e.g., row and column effects in 2-factor analyses) that must be examined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The present study examined antisocial dispositions in 487 university students. Primary and secondary psychopathy scales were developed to assess a protopsychopathic interpersonal philosophy. An antisocial action scale also was developed for purposes of validation. The primary, secondary, and antisocial action scales were correlated with each other and with boredom susceptibility and disinhibition but not with experience seeking and thrill and adventure seeking. Secondary psychopathy was associated with trait anxiety. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the strongest predictors of antisocial action were disinhibition, primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy, and sex, whereas thrill and adventure seeking was a negative predictor. This argues against a singular behavioral inhibition system mediating both antisocial and risk-taking behavior. These findings are also consistent with the view that psychopathy is a continuous dimension.
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Two studies are reported examining the reliability and validity of Levenson's Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995) in a noninstitutionalized population. The first study used 1,958 undergraduates to examine the factor structure of the LSRP and its relation to serious antisocial behavior and common dimensions of personality. The second study (n = 70) included performance tasks known to discriminate psychopathic from nonpsychopathic prisoners. Results of the studies support the reliability and validity of the LSRP. The 2-factor structure of the inventory was strongly replicated in a series of confirmatory factor analyses. Predicted relations were observed between the LSRP and other self-report instruments of delinquency. In addition, the factors of the LSRP demonstrated the predicted divergent relations to traditional personality traits. Finally, psychopathic undergraduates showed deficits in response modulation similar to those observed in incarcerated psychopaths. Implications for psychopathy in general are also discussed.
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George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems. Parts of Philosophy in the Flesh retrace the ground covered in the authors' earlier Metaphors We Live By , which revealed how we deal with abstract concepts through metaphor. (The previous sentence, for example, relies on the metaphors "Knowledge is a place" and "Knowing is seeing" to make its point.) Here they reveal the metaphorical underpinnings of basic philosophical concepts like time, causality--even morality--demonstrating how these metaphors are rooted in our embodied experiences. They repropose philosophy as an attempt to perfect such conceptual metaphors so that we can understand how our thought processes shape our experience; they even make a tentative effort toward rescuing spirituality from the heavy blows dealt by the disproving of the disembodied mind or "soul" by reimagining "transcendence" as "imaginative empathetic projection." Their source list is helpfully arranged by subject matter, making it easier to follow up on their citations. If you enjoyed the mental workout from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works , Lakoff and Johnson will, to pursue the "Learning is exercise" metaphor, take you to the next level of training. --Ron Hogan Two leading thinkers offer a blueprint for a new philosophy. "Their ambition is massive, their argument important.…The authors engage in a sort of metaphorical genome project, attempting to delineate the genetic code of human thought." -The New York Times Book Review "This book will be an instant academic best-seller." -Mark Turner, University of Maryland This is philosophy as it has never been seen before. Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers a radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self; then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytical philosophy.
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In an effort to validate Levenson, Kiehl and Fitzpatrick's [Levenson, M. R., Kiehl, K. A., & Fitzpatrick, C. M. (1995). Assessing psychopathic attributes in a noninstitutionalized population. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 151–158]. Self-report Psychopathy Scale (SRPS) we compared it to Hare's [Hare, R. D. (1991). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. Toronto: Multi-Health Systems] (PCL-R) and examined its relation to criminal activity and a passive avoidance task. Participants were 270 Caucasian and 279 African-American participants in a minimum security state prison. Confirmatory factor analysis provided modest support for the original SRPS factor structure. Although diagnostic concordance of the two instruments ranged from poor to fair, the SRPS and the PCL-R were significantly correlated and both showed similar patterns of correlations to measures of substance abuse and criminal versatility. Both measures were also predictive of performance on a passive avoidance task. While this constellation of findings provides some evidence for the construct validity of the SRPS, it also suggests that the SRPS may not measure the same construct as the PCL-R and further refinement of the instrument appears to be warranted.
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Although the evolution of psychopathy as a formal clinical disorder began more than a century ago, it is only recently that scientifically sound psychometric procedures for its assessment have become available. The result has been a sharp increase in theoretically meaningful and replicable research findings, both in applied settings and in the laboratory. The construct of psychopathy is proving to be particularly useful in the criminal justice system, where it has important implications for sentencing, diversion, placement, and treatment options and for the assessment of risk for recidivism and violence. Although the etiology of the predatory, cold-blooded nature of psychopathy remains obscure, the theories and methods of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral genetics promise to greatly increase our understanding of this disorder.
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In this article I try to trace the origin of spatialization metaphors to basic spatial concepts assimilated during the first year of life. These concepts are the up-down dimension and the near-far dimension. Numerous metaphoric expressions are organized around these early concepts. Examples are considered against the background of developmental stages from the lying position at birth to the erect posture at about 1 year. In the introduction, I discuss differing views of the roots of spatialization metaphors on the basis of Binswanger's position.
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This chapter discusses the use of cognitive methods in personality research. It is suggested that cognitive measures of personality are less reliable than self-report measures of personality. This apparent fact can be attributed to at least two important sources. Cognitive measures are very much dependent on momentary states of mind. Such factors may be less important to trait self-report measures, which do not rely on state-related sources of information to the same extent. In addition, the reliability and stability of traits derive in part from the fact that people develop very stable beliefs about themselves. These beliefs, however, may provide a misleading picture of how much people's lives and personalities are actually changing. The upshot of these two considerations leads to the suggestion that cognitive processing measures cannot, and should not, be as stable as self-reports of personality. Nevertheless, it is important to pay somewhat constant attention to the reliability of cognitive processing measures, as such measures may or may not in fact tap reliable and stable individual differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of semantic and affective verbal information. In Task 1, a lexical decision task, and in Task 2, a word identification task, participants responded faster to concrete than to abstract words. In Task 2, psychopaths made more errors identifying abstract words than concrete words. In Task 3, a word identification task, participants responded faster to positive than to negative words. In all three tasks, nonpsychopaths showed the expected event-related potential (ERP) differentiation between word stimuli, whereas psychopaths did not. In each task, the ERPs of the psychopaths included a large centrofrontal negative-going wave (N350); this wave was absent or very small in the nonpsychopaths. The interpretation and significance of these differences are discussed.
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Clinical and research evidence indicates that psychopathy is associated with anomalies in processing and using the emotional components of language. However, most research on the topic has involved simple verbal stimuli, thereby telling us little about how psychopaths process and use emotional material that is part of a more complex linguistic process. We administered an “Emotional Metaphor Q-Sort” task to 35 male inmates assessed for psychopathy with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 1991). The task consisted of metaphorical statements that had to be sorted along a continuum according to the direction and degree of their emotional valence, ranging from very negative to very positive. Although psychopaths and nonpsychopaths did not differ in their literal understanding of the metaphors, psychopaths made significantly more sorting errors than did nonpsychopaths, particularly with what should have been emotionally unambiguous metaphors. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that incarcerated psychopaths do not understand or make effective use of the emotional content of language.
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This book describes the many ways that the mind and body are closely interrelated, and how human thought and language are fundamentally linked to bodily action. The embodied nature of mind is explored through many topics, such as perception, thinking, language use, development, emotions, and consciousness. People's embodied experiences are critical to the ways they think and speak and, most generally, understand themselves, other people, and the world around them. This work provides a strong defense of the idea that embodied action is critical to the study of human cognition.
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We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of affective verbal material. Criminal psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, defined by the Psychopathy Checklist, performed a lexical decision task ("Is it a word or not?") while we recorded reaction time and event-related potentials in response to letter-strings consisting of affective and neutral words and pronounceable nonwords. On the assumption that they do not make efficient use of affective information, our primary prediction was that psychopaths would show less behavioral and event-related potential differentiation between affective and neutral words than would nonpsychopaths. The results were in accordance with this prediction. The lexical decisions of nonpsychopaths were significantly faster, and relevant event-related potential components were significantly larger, to affective words than to neutral words. In sharp contrast, psychopaths failed to show reaction time facilitation or larger amplitude event-related potentials to affective words. We suggest that psychopaths extract less information from affective words than do other individuals. Possible implications of these and related findings for understanding the behavior of psychopaths are discussed.
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We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of semantic and affective verbal information. In Task 1, a lexical decision task, and in Task 2, a word identification task, participants responded faster to concrete than to abstract words. In Task 2, psychopaths made more errors identifying abstract words than concrete words. In Task 3, a word identification task, participants responded faster to positive than to negative words. In all three tasks, nonpsychopaths showed the expected event-related potential (ERP) differentiation between word stimuli, whereas psychopaths did not. In each task, the ERPs of the psychopaths included a large centrofrontal negative-going wave (N350); this wave was absent or very small in the nonpsychopaths. The interpretation and significance of these differences are discussed.
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Metaphors linking spatial location and affect (e.g., feeling up or down) may have subtle, but pervasive, effects on evaluation. In three studies, participants evaluated words presented on a computer. In Study 1, evaluations of positive words were faster when words were in the up rather than the down position, whereas evaluations of negative words were faster when words were in the down rather than the up position. In Study 2, positive evaluations activated higher areas of visual space, whereas negative evaluations activated lower areas of visual space. Study 3 revealed that, although evaluations activate areas of visual space, spatial positions do not activate evaluations. The studies suggest that affect has a surprisingly physical basis.
Textbook of insanity (C. G. Haddock, Trans.). Philadelphia: Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenges to western thought
  • R Krafft-Ebing
Krafft-Ebing, R. (1904). Textbook of insanity (C. G. Haddock, Trans.). Philadelphia: F.A. Davis. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenges to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Assessing psychopathic attributes in a noninstitutionalized population
  • Levenson