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Category: Project

Description: The recent outbreak of Covid-19 pandemics has dramatically and globally affected people’s lives. Among newly established practices, the spread of Covid-19 has also marked the entrance in our everyday lives of concepts such as exponential growth and herd immunity. Besides, it has likely enriched our conceptual representations with new components. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by asking Italian participants during the first lockdown to rate a set of diverse words (e.g., referring to body parts, institutions, emotions, locations) on several dimensions considered to be pivotal for conceptual representation. We found concepts are organized along a main axis opposing internal and external grounding, with fine-grained distinctions within the two categories underlining the role of emotions. In addition, when compared to an existing database, our data show that Covid-19 impacted the organization of conceptual representations. First, we found subclasses of abstract concepts that are usually distinct converge into a unitary group, mainly characterized by emotions and internal grounding. Along the same lines, different subclasses of concrete concepts form a coherent class, characterized mainly by their relation with bodily aspects, and their high imageability. This group of concepts is distinctively defined by participants as easily understandable, in opposition with the third group of concepts composed of more institutional and Covid-19 related terms, for which participants felt more the need for others to understand the meaning. So, our results show that the spread of Covid-19 has simultaneously changed our lives and shaped our conceptual representations.