Owen

After being exposed to the work of Professor Kim Erwin and Charles Forceville, I became interested in ways of categorizing pictorial metaphor. I conducted a small pilot study on the topic, asking, "How are pictorial metaphors understood?" Drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black and others, I hypothesized that the difference between the categories of metaphor proposed by Erwin and Forceville would surface as differences in emotional rather than literal understanding. The initial findings from this study indicate that categories of metaphor and the metaphors were each understood in opposite ways. While confusing metaphors elicited a stronger emotional response, confusing categories were correlated with very low emotional response. While no conclusive conclusions can be drawn from such a small pilot study, it did indicate that there may be distinct emotional differences between these categories of visual metaphor, and that the categories may have different visual requirements.