Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Metaphors and Psychology


Do metaphors effect how we process information and therefore behave?  Two articles, seemingly focusing on quite different phenomenon, seem both to be suggesting that metaphors indeed do affect our behavior in pointedly emotional ways.



The first article, published in Cognitive Neuroscience Society, reports on the first neuroscience study to look at figurative language related to taste.  Francesca Citron of Freie Universität Berlin, along with her co-author Adele Goldberg of Princeton University, tested subjects brain responses to simple taste metaphors such as "The break-up was bitter for him" and compared the responses with sentences using its literal counterpart: "The break-up was bad for him."  The researchers also compared the neurological response to sentences with taste metaphors to participants' brain regions engaged when they literally ate something bitter.  What they found was that the taste metaphors not only engaged taste-related parts of the brain, but also that these metaphors tended to engage more emotion-related areas than the literal sentences.

Meanwhile, in Science, a new article reports that, according to a recent report published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hurricanes with 'Female' names are deadlier than their male sounding counterparts.  As ridiculous as this might sound, the article suggests, alarmingly, that the 'Female' hurricane names end up being 'deadlier' because people don't take the evacuation warnings for the 'Female' hurricanes as seriously as the 'Male' hurricanes.  What is strange to me about that article is that they claim hurricane Sandy is a female name.  However, I know quite a few males named Sandy (as it is often a short form for Alexander) and generally think of that name as androgynous.

In the Abstract of the article, they state:
"We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes.  Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents' preparedness to take protective action.  This finding indicates an unfortunate and unintended consequence of the gendered naming of hurricanes, with important implications for policymakers, media practitioners, and the general public concerning hurricane communication and preparedness."
These claims leave me wondering about some of this study's basic premises.  First and most importantly,  it seems like the study takes as its primary focus that the only factor in hurricane deaths is the refusal to evacuate and they base this judgement on statistical data which suggest that people make predictions about whether a hurricane will be dangerous enough to evacuate from based on its name. However, did they study statistics related to other factors such as economics, location and ease and ability to evacuate.  For example, where is the analysis of municipal programs and/or availability of public transportation and housing?  It does not appear that the researchers evaluated any of this or other relevant information in analyzing statistics of hurricane-related deaths.  It also strikes me (pun intended) that the hurricanes mentioned in their study have occurred in very different locations and populations that have very different socio-economic conditions as well as historical experiences about the dangerousness of hurricanes, the trustworthiness of warnings and resources which are provided to enable vulnerable populations to evacuate.  Given all the complex factors related to fatalities from storms, it is hard for me to believe that the most important or worthy of study relevant factor contributing to the death tolls would stem from psychological factors related to the perception of danger based on a storm's genderized name.

This study wants us to believe that how a storm is named has major implications for public policy and recommends that meterologic protocol be changed.  However, in this case, it does make me wonder if the researchers had some pre-existing ideas about the influence of gendered names for hurricanes and went about concocting a study to support their (questionable?) theory.

When considering the two studies together, the findings of the neurology of taste metaphors do allow us to believe that it could be possible that the metaphorical component of hurricane names could trigger emotional responses and that these responses could potentially be measured using neurological sensors. While this is an interesting idea, I can't help but wonder if the researchers care more about their theory than actual people's vulnerabilities and experiences, despite what they say the purpose of their study is.  Along those lines, I would like to leave you with a personal anecdote, involving my dear (male) friend Sandi, whose elderly parents were living in the evacuation zone of coastal Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy.  Despite the urgings of their eponymous son, they refused to leave their house and follow the evacuation orders and wound up trapped on the second floor of their home when the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy hit their street, causing massive flooding to their basement and first floor.  Luckily they were ok, though very traumatized and had alot of damage to their home.  However, should we take away from this anecdote that parents may be less likely to take seriously a hurricane which bears the name of their child?  Maybe the researchers want to look into that idea as the focus of their next hurricane study?