ABSTRACT When faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person’s cancer situation as a “battle” encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a “journey” does. Conversely, the “journey” frame is more likely to encourage the inference that the person can make peace with their situation than the “battle” frame. We rule out lexical priming as an explanation for this effect and examine the generalizability of these findings to individual differences across participants and to a different type of hardship—namely, an experience with depression. Finally, we examine the language participants produced after encountering one of these metaphors, and we find tendencies to repeat and extend the metaphors encountered. Together, these experiments shed light on the influential role of linguistic metaphor in the way we emotionally appraise hardship situations.

中文翻译：

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隐喻的情感含义：隐喻框架对癌症心态的影响

摘要 当面临困境时，我们如何从情感上评估情况？尽管许多因素有助于我们对困难进行推理，但在本文中，我们将重点放在语言隐喻在塑造我们应对方式中的作用。在五个实验中，我们发现将一个人的癌症情况描述为“战斗”会鼓励人们相信如果他们没有康复，比将相同的情况描述为“旅程”更容易感到内疚。相反，与“战斗”框架相比，“旅程”框架更有可能促进人们可以与他们的处境和平相处的推断。我们排除了词汇启动作为这种效应的解释，并检查了这些发现对参与者个体差异和不同类型的困难（即抑郁经历）的普遍性。最后，我们检查遇到这些隐喻之一后产生的语言参与者，我们发现重复和扩展遇到的隐喻的趋势。总之，这些实验揭示了语言隐喻在我们情感上评估困难情况的方式中的影响作用。