Data from several experiments show that, contrary to traditional models of variety seeking, individuals choose to switch to less-preferred options even though they enjoy those items less than they would have enjoyed repeating a more-preferred option. Two explanations for this finding are tested. Results indicate no evidence of a benefit to more-preferred options due to the contrast to less-preferred alternatives. However, the results of three...

Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently—English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study, Mandarin speakers...

How does space come to be used to represent nonspatial relations, as in graphs? Approximately 1200 children and adults from three language cultures, English, Hebrew, and Arabic, produced graphic representations of spatial, temporal, quantitative, and preference relations. Children placed stickers on square pieces of paper to represent, for example, a disliked food, a liked food, and a favorite food. Two major analyses of these data...

The present paper evaluates the claim that abstract conceptual domains are structured through metaphorical mappings from domains grounded directly in experience. In particular, the paper asks whether the abstract domain of time gets its relational structure from the more concrete domain of space. Relational similarities between space and time are outlined along with several explanations of how these similarities may have arisen. Three experiments designed...

Temporal language is often couched in spatial metaphors. English has been claimed to have two space → time metaphoric systems: the ego-moving metaphor, wherein the observer's context progresses along the time-line towards the future, and the time-moving metaphor, wherein time is conceived of as a river or conveyor belt on which events are moving from the future to the past. In three experiments, we investigated...

Recent studies have provided evidence for mental simulation as a strategy in mechanical reasoning. This type of reasoning can be dissociated from reasoning based on deive knowledge in that it depends on different abilities and memory stores, is expressed more easily in gesture than in language, exhibits analog properties, and can result in correct inferences in situations where people do not have correct deive knowledge....

Positive and negative moods have been shown to increase likelihood estimates of future events matching these states in valence (e.g., E. J. Johnson and A. Tversky, 1983). In the present article, 4 studies provide evidence that this congruency bias (1) is not limited to valence but functions in an emotion-specific manner, (2) derives from the informational value of emotions, and (3) is not the inevitable...

The authors hypothesized that people's predictions of how other people feel in emotionally arousing situations are often based on people's predictions of how they themselves would feel in those situations. Indeed, most participants in Study 1 reported predicting hungry hikers' feelings by mentally trading places with them, imagining what their own feelings would be in the hikers' situation. Because people's predictions of their own feelings...

Prior findings of emotional numbness (rather than distress) among socially excluded persons led the authors to investigate whether exclusion causes a far-reaching insensitivity to both physical and emotional pain. Experiments 1-4 showed that receiving an ostensibly diagnostic forecast of a lonesome future life reduced sensitivity to physical pain, as indicated by both (higher) thresholds and tolerance. Exclusion also caused emotional insensitivity, as indicated by reductions...

Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with distinct faculties1,2 and maintain specialized neural structures to enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function of the human amygdala3,4 is to enhance the perception of stimuli that have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention for normal perceptual awareness—that is, the attentional blink5,6—we show that...