Abstract
Emotion metaphor provides us a means of expressing abstract and complicated emotions through reference to objective figures. In contrast to pictures, facial expressions or speech prosodies often used to communicate emotion explicitly, emotion metaphors are less studied, particularly in Taiwan. This study aimed to construct an emotion metaphoric corpus and develop a frequency norm of emotion metaphors used in Taiwan. This research was based on a stratified sample of 1,128 college students in Taiwan. An emotion metaphor task was used to collect participants' responses that involved metaphors. The task divided emotion metaphors into four types (sensation metaphors, event metaphors, object metaphors and personality metaphors). Within each type, participants were asked to generate various kinds of metaphoric responses according to ten emotional categories with different valences (positive: happiness, love, pride, comfort; neutral: calm, surprise; negative: sadness, fear, anger, disgust). Participants' responses were recorded, and both commonality and idiosyncrasy were calculated for the different types of metaphoric stimuli (sensation, event, object, personality). A qualitative analysis of the resulting data revealed that participants gave various metaphoric responses to different kinds of emotion in different types of metaphor. For example, for sensation metaphors for happiness, the prime response was incense; for event metaphors for happiness, the prime response was having a journey; for object metaphors for happiness, the prime response was friend; and for the personality metaphor for happiness, the highest response was open-mindedness. Interestingly, participants generated quite distinct responses in the negative metaphor set. For instance, for the sensation metaphor for fear, the prime response was "black" (color); for the event metaphor for fear, the prime response was exam; for the object metaphor for fear, the prime response was ghost; and for the personality metaphor for fear, the prime response was timidity. Additionally, commonality and idiosyncrasy were also compared across the four categories of metaphoric stimuli. In sum, this study established a norm of Taiwanese metaphoric responses, which can be employed for further research on emotions.