Psychological Perspectives on Metaphor

Metaphors are commonly defined as figures of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another thing that is notably different. For example, in the metaphor love is a rose, the target term love refers to a human emotion, whereas the source term rose refers to a flowering plant. Metaphor is classified as a type of figurative language (along with idioms, irony, metonymy, and several other forms), and until fairly recently, it was assumed that metaphors and other figures of speech were relatively unimportant aspects of communication. However, it is now recognized that metaphor is pervasive in everyday language, and a growing number of researchers and theorists now view metaphor more as an aspect of thought than of language. Indeed, metaphor has been shown to be involved in knowledge acquisition, conceptual change, abstract reasoning, social persuasion, and even the development of empathy between individuals and groups. It is hardly surprising, then, that metaphor now occupies a central place in many areas of research on cognition and communication. This article begins by listing a number of introductory volumes, anthologies, and journals devoted to metaphor and related forms of figurative language. Next, a lengthy section on theoretical approaches to metaphor processing traces the evolution of different perspectives on the nature of metaphor and discusses a range of important theories and key research studies. This is followed by a section on metaphoric framing in text and discourse, which describes both laboratory and real-world studies of how metaphor is used to structure knowledge and change attitudes. A short section on nonlinguistic and multimodal metaphors covers recent work on metaphor in gesture, visual art, music, and other domains. The next two sections describe developmental research and cognitive neuroscience research on metaphor. Finally, the last section covers practical resources for metaphor research, including guides to research methods and collections of metaphors.