Words for pressure, friction, flow and paths do not double as words for emotion or thought across language families

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.