Metaphors of happiness in Spanish

This paper investigates the affective dimension of metaphor meaning. Previous research has extensively examined the role of metaphor conventionality in metaphor comprehension, however, less attention has been given to whether the level of conventionality — a metaphor’s familiarity or salience — is related to its affective component. This study addresses that question in the context of happiness metaphors in Spanish. The study has two main objectives. First, metaphorical expressions related to happiness were identified and categorized into conceptual metaphors using a sample of language taken from the Corpus del Español. Second, sixty participants evaluated 96 metaphorical expressions of happiness in terms of affective valence strength, familiarity, and imageability. The ratings revealed strong correlations among the three variables: metaphors that were more familiar and easier to imagine tended to be associated with more extreme affective valence values. Nevertheless, subsequent regression-based mediation analysis suggested that the influence of familiarity on valence may be mediated by imageability. The findings are discussed in relation to embodied models of conceptual metaphor representation.