earticle

영어

This paper aims to investigate whether emotional experiences influence the understanding of metaphorical expressions about time. Korean college students were asked to resolve the ambiguous time question on different conditions of emotional experiences, both past and future. Two studies showed that unpleasant events from the past and pleasant events in the future elicit the ego-moving perspective, whereas pleasant events from past and unpleasant events in the future elicit the time-moving perspective. Specifically, in the case of English question, a reliable difference was found in the proportion of Monday and Friday responses across pleasant and unpleasant events from the past conditions, but it was not across pleasant and unpleasant events in the future. And in the case of Korean question, a reliable difference was not found in the proportion of the two responses across pleasant and unpleasant events from the past as well as in the future. I suggest it is because Korean people have a significant preference for the time-moving perspective in the interpretation of the ambiguous time question in Korean and past emotional experiences are more intense than anticipated future emotional experiences. The results provide new evidence for the role of emotional experiences in resolving temporal ambiguity in English and Korean.