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Spatializing Emotion: No Evidence for a Domain-General Magnitude System

People implicitly associate different emotions with different locations in left-right space. Which aspects of emotion do they spatialize, and why? Across many studies people spatialize emotional valence, mapping positive emotions onto their dominant side of space and negative emotions onto their non-dominant side, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation. Yet other results suggest a conflicting mapping of emotional intensity (a.k.a., emotional magnitude), according to which people associate more intense emotions with the right and less intense emotions with the left - regardless of their valence; this pattern has been interpreted as support for a domain-general system for representing magnitudes. To resolve the apparent contradiction between these mappings, we first tested whether people implicitly map either valence or intensity onto left-right space, depending on which dimension of emotion they attend to (Experiments 1a, b). When asked to judge emotional valence, participants showed the predicted valence mapping. However, when asked to judge emotional intensity, participants showed no systematic intensity mapping. We then tested an alternative explanation of findings previously interpreted as evidence for an intensity mapping (Experiments 2a, b). These results suggest that previous findings may reflect a left-right mapping of spatial magnitude (i.e., the size of a salient feature of the stimuli) rather than emotion. People implicitly spatialize emotional valence, but, at present, there is no clear evidence for an implicit lateral mapping of emotional intensity. These findings support metaphor theory and challenge the proposal that mental magnitudes are represented by a domain-general metric that extends to the domain of emotion.