The heart’s downward path to happiness: Cross-cultural diversity in spatial metaphors of affect

This is a dataset of an image categorization task examining the semantic scope of the Mlabri metaphorical expressions klol jur 'to be happy, content, calm (lit. heart going down)' and klol khɯn/klol kɔbɔ jur 'to be upset, distressed, unhappy (lit. heart going up/heart not going down)’. Nine Mlabri participants recruited in Baan Huai Yuak (Nan province, Thailand) were interviewed in this study. The participants viewed 20 images from the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS) (Kurdi et al. 2017) and were asked whether they made them feel klol jur and klol khɯn. The task was carried out in Mlabri. Participants were not forced to choose between the provided metaphorical expressions and sometimes gave other responses. Entries include the target metaphorical expressions (or their contextual variants), other expressions, and "NR" (‘no response’). The justifications for specific image categorizations/descriptions are not part of this dataset.