News in Science

The sunny side always looks up

Language power Researchers can now explain why when we hear the word 'happy' our gaze or attention tends to shift subtly upwards, but when we hear the word 'sad' it shifts down.

It's all to do with how often abstract words like this are associated with the word 'up' or 'down' in language, says Dr Stephanie Goodhew of the Australian National University's Research School of Psychology, who is lead author of a new study published in a recent issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

"It's striking that just the language we're exposed to can affect something as fundamental as where we are looking," says Goodhew.

Previous research has found that humans map concepts in space. For example reading or hearing the word 'happy' or 'sky' tends to cause us to shift our gaze and orient our attention upwards slightly, where as the word 'bitter' or 'ground' is associated with a downward focus.

For concrete concept words like 'sky' and 'ground' there is a fairly intuitive explanation for this association: after all, the sky is above us and the ground is below us.

"But that explanation doesn't really work when it comes to the more abstract concepts," says Goodhew.

"They are not seen as concrete objects in the world but they still have this ability to affect our attention."

Previous research has not been able to explain why these abstract concepts shift our attention and gaze.

"We were looking to find a way in which those associations might develop in people."

Word game

Goodhew and colleagues investigated the idea that we learn such associations from language.

They used a massive database of language [called google Ngram] to measure the frequency with which concept words occurred close to the words 'up' and 'down'.

They then selected a group of words, half of which were associated with the word 'up' and half of which were associated with the word 'down'.

Words associated with 'down' included 'ground', 'spider', 'delay', 'Satan' and 'sad', while words associated with 'up' included 'sky', 'ceiling', 'candy', 'God', 'dream' and 'happy'.

In the lab the researchers then studied how these words, shown on a computer screen, were able to direct the attention of 57 study participants.

The researchers measured how quickly people identified visual targets [a random flashing letter] that appeared above or below a concept word.

They found that the frequency with which the concept word appeared with the spatial concepts (up/down) in the language database predicted the extent to which it could shift the participant's attention up or down.

"If sky and up occur together commonly in English then sky would be better able to shift attention up," says Goodhew.

"These results suggest that language usage patterns may be instrumental in explaining how people come to associate abstract concepts with locations in space."

Interestingly, says Goodhew, previous research has also suggested smaller numbers are associated with the words 'left' and 'yesterday', whereas larger numbers are associated with the words 'right' and 'tomorrow'.

"This is just scratching the surface," she says. "I'm sure there's going to be many other types of mapping that are going to affect us in very systematic ways."