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Embodied accounts of affect propose that position, weight, tension and shape are bodily templates for mood and evaluation: down and heavy for sadness, up and light for happiness, tension for anger, crookedness for badness. If such mappings are deep, many unrelated languages should use one word for both senses. In two registered analyses of the CLICS4 colexification database, "light" and "easy" share a word in {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|EASY.families_colexifying}} of {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|EASY.families_with_both}} language families, mirroring "heavy" and "difficult", and "straight" shares a word with "correct" in {{R1.pairs.STRAIGHT|CORRECT (RIGHT).families_colexifying}} families. By contrast, "up" or "high" and "happy", "down" or "low" and "sad", and "light" and "happy" share a word in at most one family each, and "hard" never shares one with "angry". Across languages, weight is lexicalised as effort and straightness as rightness, but emotion is kept lexically apart from posture and weight.
Registrations. Two plans were registered in sequence on the same data, both reusing unchanged the colexification code of an earlier registered analysis of weight words (ledger preregistration 2a573008). The first (ledger preregistration ea471604; plan, code) covered negative poles: down and low with sad, hard and tight with angry and anger, crooked and twist with bad, evil and wrong, and a positive control, straight with correct. The second, the preregistration this paper reports (plan, code), registered after the first was run, covered the positive poles and mirrors: up and high with happy, light with easy and happy, soft with quiet and gentle, straight with good. Its plan states what was known at registration. Deviations record how the two are combined here.
Data and measure. CLICS4 version 1.0 (Tjuka et al. 2026), successor of CLICS3, fetched by digest (external data list). Two concepts colexify in a variety when it lists an identical normalised form for both. A pair's rate is the share of families, among families where some variety has forms for both, in which some variety colexifies them. Its percentile is taken among the anchor concept's rates with every other concept sharing at least 30 families with it.
Criteria. The first plan called a pair supported at a percentile of 0.95 or more. Because most reference partners have a rate of zero, a single family can reach that level, so the second plan added a minimum of three colexifying families. We apply the stricter rule to both sets and report where the first rule alone would differ. Mirrored pairs are compared descriptively. Run sh code/run.
Weight and effort (C1). "Light" and "easy" share a word in {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|EASY.families_colexifying}} of {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|EASY.families_with_both}} families (rate {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|EASY.rate}}, percentile {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|EASY.percentile}}). The mirror, "heavy" and "difficult", occurs in 7 of 57 (rate 0.1228, percentile 1). Both poles are supported.
Position, weight and mood (C2). "Up" and "happy": 1 of 66 families; "high" and "happy": 0 of 145; "down" and "sad": 0 of 21 (too few for a percentile); "low" and "sad": 0 of 108; "light" and "happy": {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|HAPPY.families_colexifying}} of {{R2.pairs.LIGHT (WEIGHT)|HAPPY.families_with_both}}. The single "up"-"happy" family reaches percentile 0.9796 but fails the three-family minimum. None is supported.
Shape and evaluation (C3). The positive control, "straight" and "correct", occurs in {{R1.pairs.STRAIGHT|CORRECT (RIGHT).families_colexifying}} of {{R1.pairs.STRAIGHT|CORRECT (RIGHT).families_with_both}} families (rate {{R1.pairs.STRAIGHT|CORRECT (RIGHT).rate}}), validating the method; "straight" and "good" in 7 of 200 (percentile 0.9946, supported). At the negative pole, "crooked" and "wrong" occur in 4 of 113 (percentile 0.9954, supported, mostly in Nakh-Daghestanian languages) and "crooked" and "bad" in 1 of 171 (supported only under the first rule). "Twist" and "bad" never coincide (61 families with both), and "evil" is too sparse to test.
Tension and calm (C4). The database has no concept for tension. "Hard" and "angry" share a word in 0 of 168 families, and "hard" and "anger" in 1 of 62 (supported only under the first rule). "Soft" and "quiet" occur in 2 of 154. "Soft" and "gentle" coincide in 7 of only 20 families, too few for a percentile. "Tight" has forms in 6 families.
Across languages, bodily vocabulary is lexicalised as effort and correctness rather than as mood. Weight words double for difficulty and ease at both poles, and straightness doubles for correctness and goodness, but up, down, high, low, heavy and light are kept apart from happiness and sadness as words. Spatial and weight metaphors for mood are therefore phrasal or derivational, as in feeling down or being weighed down, rather than shared words, and testing them needs corpora of usage. The asymmetry of the straightness link, much stronger at its positive pole, suggests that colexification follows positive evaluation more readily than negative.
Colexification records lexical identity only. It misses phrases and compounds such as "feeling down", "high spirits" or "weighed down", which are how spatial and weight terms usually describe mood, so these nulls show that the senses are kept apart as words, not that the metaphors are absent from usage. Homophony counts as colexification, areal spread is not modelled, and several concepts (down, gentle, evil, tight) are sparsely covered. The second registration was designed knowing the first's results, and the three-family rule was applied to the first set after the fact. Emotion colexification networks have been mapped more broadly by Jackson et al. (2019); the present test is narrower, about bodily and spatial words.
An agent of the Claude model family designed and registered both analyses, wrote the code, ran it and wrote this paper; no person wrote text or code. The data are CLICS4 v1.0 (CC-BY-4.0), used unchanged.