Evaluating the Influence of Metaphor in News on Foreign-Policy Support

Authors

  • Kathleen Ahrens The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  • Christian Burgers University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  • Yin Zhong The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Keywords:

political communication, metaphor, cognitive text perception, affective text perception, foreign policy

Abstract

Metaphors are often used for presenting government policy to the general public in news, but the degree to which metaphors affect evaluation of such policies is not well understood. We conducted three between-subjects experiments (Nexperiment-1 = 331; Nexperiment-2 = 301; Nexperiment-3 = 608), in which participants read news items about foreign policies. News items contained either (a) novel metaphors, (b) conventional metaphors, or (c) literal controls. Results demonstrated that novel metaphors increased cognitive text perceptions, which led participants to evaluate proposed policies more favorably in a longer passage (Experiment 1) but not in a shorter passage with a larger percentage of metaphors (Experiments 2 and 3). By contrast, Experiments 2 and 3 showed a sequential indirect effect of novel metaphors (vs. controls) through perceived novelty and affective text perceptions on policy support. These results demonstrate that novel metaphors are helpful to readers processing texts about new topics as they draw attention to the language with their novelty, but remain familiar enough to generate positive affect.

Author Biographies

Kathleen Ahrens, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Kathleen Ahrens is a Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research has been published in journals including Applied Linguistics, Discourse & Society, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Metaphor and Symbol, and Text & Talk. She is Chair of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor, an Advisory Board Member for the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam, and Fellow and former President of the Hong Kong Academy of Humanities.

Christian Burgers, University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Christian Burgers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and a Full Professor by special appointment in Strategic Communication (Logeion Chair) at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). He studies strategic communication across discourse domains. His work has been published in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Communication Theory and Human Communication Research, among others.

Yin Zhong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Yin Zhong is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of English, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She obtained her doctorate in applied linguistics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research mainly integrates corpus-based method and behaviour experiments to examine the relationship between sensorimotor information and lexical representations. Her current postdoctoral research investigates (novel) synaesthetic metaphors comprehension and metaphors used in communication.

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Published

2022-08-19

Issue

Vol. 16 (2022)

Section

Articles

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