A Study Of The "Water" Images In The Context Of Parallel Studies

Emotions play a vital role in human life;for example,positive emotional states are beneficial to human health and communication.Thus,the study of positive emotions is of great significance and necessity.Images and words are the most common emotioninducing materials in emotional research.Existing studies have shown that there are great differences in emotion induction capacity between verbal and visual materials,but such studies have always remained at a literal level without metaphors.However,figurative language is widely used in daily communication to convey emotions and can convey more substantial emotional experiences than literal language,significantly activating brain regions related to emotional processing.In advertising,metaphorical images are more appealing to viewers and elicit positive attitudes than literal images.Such emotional activities involve high-level cognitive functions and require the interaction and coordination of multiple brain regions.Therefore,exploring positive emotional processing from the perspective of functional brain connectivity can better reveal its mechanism.Thus,this study selected metaphorical sentences and images to explore the emotional processing mechanism of the visual and textual modalities from the perspective of brain functional connectivity,primarily aiming to answer the following two questions:1)Are the positive emotions induced by visual metaphors different from those induced by verbal metaphors? 2)Based on EEG signals,what are the differences in emotion processing patterns between positive verbal and visual metaphors?The experiment was a within-subject block design with two factors.The independent variables are modality and metaphoricity,and the dependent variables are emotional arousal and valence ratings,EEG coherence values,and μ index.Thirty-three students from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China were recruited to read literal sentences,metaphorical sentences and watch literal images and metaphorical images,then to finish self-report ratings of arousal and valence.Additionally,brain activities in the delta,theta,alpha,beta,and gamma frequency bands were recorded when participants viewed different materials using EEG technology with high temporal resolution.Coherence analysis was used to calculate coherence values and μ index between 1891 electrode pairs under each experimental condition,exploring the strength of collaboration in different brain regions during positive emotional processing induced by visual and verbal metaphors and differences in resource allocation patterns.It was found that the self-reported ratings of participants in the experiment showed a higher level of arousal for visual metaphors compared with verbal metaphors.The results of EEG coherence analysis showed significant differences only in the beta frequency band.Positive emotional processing of both visual and verbal metaphors significantly activated the frontal,parietal,and occipital lobes in the beta band.However,the coherence values of visual metaphors were significantly higher than those of verbal metaphors,indicating stronger functional connectivity in the three brain regions during visual metaphor processing.The results of the μ index revealed that,compared with verbal metaphors,visual metaphors activated fewer common electrodes for the positive emotions they induced,suggesting that they require more resources allocated by the brain.This study contributes to deepening the understanding of emotional processing models of visual metaphors and verbal metaphors in functional brain connectivity and resource allocation patterns and to promoting and expanding the development of current research on the emotional processing of metaphors.In addition,although EEG coherence analysis has been widely applied in psychological and pathological studies of emotional processing,it is still a new attempt in the field of linguistics and provides evidence for the application of EEG coherence analysis in linguistic studies.Finally,the findings of eliciting positive emotions in the beta band by visual and verbal metaphors provide a scientific basis for selecting metaphors verbally or visually as induction materials in clinical research on emotional perception and in the field of intelligent emotion recognition.