Similar studies

Psychological states are often described in mechanical terms: under pressure, crushed, torn, worn down, flowing, stuck, off course. If such mappings were deep and widespread, unrelated languages should often use one word for the mechanical and the psychological sense, as many use one word for "heavy" and "difficult". In a registered screen of the CLICS4 colexification database, we paired words for compression and tension, shear and friction, flow and momentum, and paths with concepts of emotion, cognition and effort. None of these pairs met the registered criterion of recurring across several families more often than the word's other pairings; each class had 0 hits against about 0.477 to 0.719 expected for random concepts. Only the load words reached it, through "heavy" with "difficult" and "light" with "easy" (2 hits, p = 0.0633). Across languages, weight is the one mechanical domain lexicalised as a psychological quantity.

• Published, Reproduced.Published, Reproduced: Across CLICS4 v1.0, none of 37 words for compression and tension, shear and friction, flow and momentum, or paths shares a word with any of 30 emotion, cognition or effort concepts in at least three language families at the 95th percentile of the word's other pairings; each of the four classes has 0, 0, 0, 0 hits, against a mean of 0.48 to 0.72 for random concept sets of the same size.
• Published, Reproduced, Reviewed.Published, Reproduced, Reviewed: Weight words are the exception: 'heavy' and 'light (weight)' give 2 hits among five load words (with 'difficult' and 'easy'), against 0.304 expected for random concept sets, though the class-level excess does not reach the registered 0.05 level (p = 0.0633), so the class test has limited sensitivity.

Accounts that treat the felt weight of depression as more than metaphor rest on a premise: that distress is described in gravitational terms across unrelated languages. We tested a lexical form of that premise in a registered analysis of the CLICS4 database of cross-linguistic colexifications, asking whether languages use one word for "heavy" and for difficulty, grief, sadness or tiredness more often than for other concepts, and whether gravity-related words share words with sadness more than other physical-property words do. "Heavy" and "difficult" share a word in 7 of 57 families, more often than "heavy" pairs with any of its 1374 reference concepts, and "heavy" and "grief" in 2 families. "Heavy" never shares a word with "sad" (zero of 156 families) or "tired", and gravity-related words show no detectable excess with sadness (permutation p = 0.2232). Lexically, weight is widely the word for burden, not for sadness.

• Published, Reproduced, Reviewed.Published, Reproduced, Reviewed: In CLICS4 v1.0 (3447 varieties, 247 families), a single word means both 'heavy' and 'difficult' in at least one language of 7 of the 57 families that have words for both (family-level rate 0.1228), higher than the rate for every one of 'heavy's 1374 reference partner concepts, whose 95th percentile is 0.0051; 'heavy' and 'grief' share a word in 2 of 69 families (rate 0.029, percentile 0.9964).
• Published, Reproduced, Reviewed.Published, Reproduced, Reviewed: In the same data, 'heavy' never shares a word with 'sad' (0 of 156 families) or 'tired' (0 of 73), and 'sad' or 'grief' shares a word with any of 15 physical-property concepts in at most 2 families each, so gravity-related words (heavy, low, down) do not colexify with sadness detectably more than other physical-property words (difference in family-level rates 0.0031, one-sided permutation p = 0.2232).