Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This project examined whether the cultural and linguistic experiences of English and Chinese speakers can result indifferent metaphorical representations of emotion in those individuals. The Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) techniquewas used to measure how strongly various colors are associated with anger, sadness, happiness, fear, envy, shame and shyness.The results showed that some metaphorical associations like red-anger are common in both English and Chinese speakers,whereas other associations are culturally-specific (e.g., red is also associated with happiness in Chinese, while only Englishindividuals associate blue with sadness). Some interesting gender differences were also obtained, such that Chinese femalesassociate shyness with pink, but males with red. Black was associated with fear in both genders in Chinese, but only presentin English males. This study thus demonstrates that the conceptual representations of different emotions are shaped by anindividual’s linguistic and cultural experience.