Distributed embodiment of metaphorical hope in hand, head, and eyebrow gestures

Omid Khatin-Zadeh; Danyal Farsani; Jiehui Hu; Mirko Farina; Hassan Banaruee; Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1139881

Distributed embodiment of metaphorical hope in hand, head, and eyebrow gestures

Front Psychol. 2023 Mar 22:14:1139881. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1139881. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Omid Khatin-Zadeh¹, Danyal Farsani², Jiehui Hu¹, Mirko Farina³, Hassan Banaruee⁴, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Foreign Languages, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
² Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
³ Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Human Machine Interaction Lab, Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia.
⁴ Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies, The University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
⁵ University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia.

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the embodied conceptualization of hope through metaphors. We asked a group of participants to discuss their hopes in a semi-structured interview. We examined the types of hand, head, and eyebrow gestures produced when they were talking about their future hopes. The obtained results showed that when participants talked about their future hopes, they mainly used forward hand gestures, rightward head gestures, and upward eyebrow gestures. Based on these results, it is suggested that various semantic components and emotional associations of hope are metaphorically embodied in different manners in various parts of the body. The future aspect of hope is conceptualized as a forward movement and is embodied as a forward hand gesture. The good or positive emotional aspect associated with future hopes is metaphorically conceptualized as a rightward head gesture or an upward eyebrow gesture. We call this process distributed embodiment of a metaphorical concept. Our proposal is supported by the findings of past studies that have found future is metaphorically embodied as something in front of us (or forward movement), and good is metaphorically embodied as upper space (or upward movement) or right side (or rightward movement).

Keywords: distributed embodiment; gesture; hope; metaphoric conceptualization; semiotics.