Adele Goldberg Builds an Emotional Case for Clichés

Goldberg, a professor of psychology, says the brain finds clichés rich in meaning and emotion

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By Katharine Gammon ’03

Published Jan. 27, 2022

2 min read

Goldberg

Photo: Sameer A. Khan h’21

I’m at a standstill. I’ve taken two steps backward. That idea went right over my head. I’m barely managing to stay afloat. These conventional metaphors, used to convey abstract concepts, are so commonplace that we may not even notice when we use or hear them. But Princeton psychology professor Adele Goldberg can spot them in a flash; she studies how the brain takes in this kind of cliché.

In a study published in the Journal of Memory and Language in December, Goldberg created a database of 180 English sentences consisting of these conventional metaphors alongside literal paraphrases and concrete descriptions. She found that people’s brains pay more attention to clichés than to the other ways of conveying the same information.

Goldberg used eye-tracking software in her lab to test how 66 people responded to hearing those phrases. When someone’s pupils dilate, it’s a sign that their brains are working harder to process the information or that they are more emotionally engaged, she says. And Goldberg found that’s exactly what happened: When the participants heard the clichés, their pupils widened.

The brain was processing them differently, even though the language didn’t stand out in any way. “There’s nothing remarkable about these phrases,” says Goldberg. “We use them every day without even noticing.”

In addition to testing pupil size, Goldberg and Serena Mon ’20 asked questions about the sentences, comparing the literal and metaphorical phrases. The study participants reported that the clichés were no more informative than other ways of communication but were richer in meaning and more emotional.

Emotions are tied to understanding in unexpected ways. While conducting earlier studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain, Goldberg stumbled upon the fact that when people were passively listening to clichéd language, their amygdalas — the small, almond-shaped region of the brain involved in emotions and motivations — became more active.

It makes sense that the amygdala is bound up in cognitive engagement, Goldberg says. “My own feeling is that emotions drive everything we do,” she says. “And metaphors appear to be more engaging in some ineffable way.”

Goldberg plans to follow up with a study in second-language learners and test if they are as emotionally involved in metaphorical language as people who have heard such clichés for their entire lives. She’d also like to know if the emotional engagement changes with how proficient someone is in English.

Published in the February 2022 Issue

Research

2 Responses

Richard A. Etlin ’69 72 78

2 Years Ago

Speaking Metaphorically

Thank you for the fascinating account about the research by the Princeton psychology professor Adele Goldberg into how fundamental metaphors, sometimes expressed as clichés, exert a powerful hold over the imagination and over feelings (On the Campus, February issue). She is contributing to an extremely valuable field of research with a well-established pedigree. Apparently the central role of such “base metaphors,” as they have been called, was first articulated toward the early 1930s by Arnaud Dandieu, political thinker and writer who also explored the psychological insights of Marcel Proust. Dandieu’s ideas were developed further by his friend, the brilliant phenomenologist and psychiatrist Dr. Eugène Minkowski, who explored the concept in Vers une Cosmologie: fragments philosophiques (1936, Towards a Cosmology: Philosophical Fragments). The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson would, independently of their French antecedents, articulate the notion, which they termed “conceptual metaphors,” popularized in their Metaphors We Live By (1980) and in their subsequent books and articles. Lakoff’s Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (2002) and Your Brain’s Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide (2016, written with Elisabeth Wehling) are particularly relevant for understanding today’s political culture. Indeed, as these authors have shown, the effects of base metaphors are far reaching.