Norms for 204 Literary and 260 Nonliterary Metaphors on 10 Psychological Dimensions

Abstract Norms on 464 metaphors are presented for 10 dimensions representing ratings of comprehensibility, some perceived metaphoric qualities, imagery values, familiarity, and tenor-vehicle relatedness. The items were either literary metaphors selected from works of poetry (N = 204) or nonliterary metaphors generated by the experimenters (N = 260). Analyses of the normative data indicated that (a) the mean ratings of the metaphors were reliable (average Cronbach alpha = 0.88); (b) even so, individuals varied in their reactions to the metaphors; (c) the 10 dimensions correlated substantially with one another; and (d) literary and nonliterary metaphors showed similar patterns for the descriptive and relational statistics examined. These data demonstrate the need for metaphor researchers to consider multiple attributes if they are to achieve less confounded or factorial variation of theoretically motivated variables. The normative data provided here exhibit sufficient variation among items and independence among scales for use in such studies.