Event Date: Friday, 18Â March, 2016
Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [1st floor seminar room]
Speaker: Francesca Citron (Lancaster University)
Title: Figurative language plays an important role in evoking emotion: Neuroscientific evidence
Abstract: Research on language has shown that the emotional content of verbal material affects comprehension of single words, sentences, as well as texts. This research mainly focused on literal language. However, figurative language may play an important role in conveying emotion. Recent neuroimaging evidence from our lab showed that conventional metaphors related to taste, e.g., she looked at him sweetly, are more emotionally evocative than their literal counterparts, i.e., she looked at him kindly; specifically, the former elicited enhanced activation of the left amygdala, associated with processing of emotionally salient stimuli. This finding suggests that, despite the meaning of both sentences being highly similar, the metaphorical formulation seem to engage the reader more strongly at the emotional level. In order to generalise this finding beyond the taste domain and to simulate more natural reading processes, we conducted a follow-up study using different types of metaphors, e.g., she had a rough day; this is a heavy matter, embedded in short stories. We found that all stories evoked emotional reactions to some extent, but metaphorical ones activated more peaks within the amygdala. Furthermore, by increasing metaphoricity as a continuous variable, we also found stronger amygdala activation. Finally, I will present novel imaging data on the comprehension of emotionally-laden idiomatic expressions, e.g., she spilled the beans; he’s in seventh heaven.