Linguistics

Framing effect

Cognitive psychology

Engineering

Philosophy

Social psychology

Battle

Archaeology

Developmental psychology

Generalizability theory

Psychology

Superordinate goals

Epistemology

Framing (construction)

Structural engineering

Persuasion

Metaphor

Mindset

History

Metaphor and Symbol

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.

Emotional Implications of Metaphor: Consequences of Metaphor Framing for Mindset about Cancer