The Effect of Emotional Prosody on the Understanding of Emotional Metaphors

This study investigated how emotional information conveyed through voice influences the understanding of emotional metaphors. Emotional metaphors were used as experimental stimuli in which speakers described their own negative emotional experiences. We presented the metaphors auditorily using synthesized speech in order to manipulate the emotional information conveyed by the voice. We examined how such vocal emotional information affected listeners’ cognition of the metaphors in terms of harshness, indirectness, and negativity. The results showed that emotional prosody significantly influenced the understanding of emotional metaphors, particularly the degree to which a metaphor was perceived as unforgiving, roundabout, or negative. Furthermore, the effects of emotional prosody appeared to interact with multiple factors, such as the topic and vehicle of the metaphor and how the listener perceived the politeness of the emotional expression. These findings suggest that emotional prosody plays a complex and context-dependent role in the understanding of emotional metaphors.