Influence of Category Label and Metaphor on Judgments About Mental Disorder Characteristics ¹⁶⁴

Category labels affect people’s judgments regarding mental disorders which are unknown to them. Descriptions of these ‘unknown’ disorders that do have a name, are assumed by people to be more stable and having reasons to exist, when compared with the same descriptions of disorders - without a specific name [3]. However, it is not clear whether this effect can be evoked by other linguistic parameters, for instance, by metaphors. We hypothesized that including a metaphor in the description of a mental disorder would lead to the same effect even without a category name. We replicated a study by Giffin and colleagues’ and added a new experimental condition in which participants read texts with the descriptions of a person’s unusual behaviour without the disorder's name, but with its metaphoric description. After reading the texts, participants assessed a few statements concerning some characteristics of the disorder. The results showed that the effect of a category label was replicated, and the metaphoric description also evoked a significant effect, but it was found in judgments of different characteristics of the disorder.

Keywords: metaphor, category, assessment of mental disorders, explanation, category label

Column: Empirical research

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17759/cpse.2020090304

Funding. The reported study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), Project Number 19-313-51010

Acknowledgements. We wish to thank M.P. Zherdeva for assistance in data collection and Dr. M. Arsalidou for her comments on earlier versions of the manuscript