Emotional Distance and Deixis

Teaching a subject area that you are relatively unfamiliar with has several advantages, not least of which is that it is is easy to make discoveries, which in turn makes teaching more fun. I'm not pretending, by the way, that these are true discoveries—that is to say, facts previously unknown to linguistic science—only that they are not in the textbook I am teaching from, and that they are new to me.

Here at Kobe College I am teaching a two semester course entitled Meaning and Cognition. For the most part, it is a straight Intro to Semantics course, though in every lesson I try to think of a cognitive angle on a particular topic, as much as anything to inject something interesting into a subject that can be jaw-droppingly dull if not seasoned in some way or other with cute facts.

So today, I was teaching Deixis
(based on Unit 7 of the Hurford, Heasley, Smith coursebook). In discussing deictic spatial terms such as here/there and this/that, the coursebook discusses the rather obvious fact that this always contrasts with that in denoting objects in (physical or metaphorical) space that are closer to the speaker (and which may be further away from the listener):

1a. He bought me this one, not that one [this one = object closer (in space) to the speaker].
1b. That party was much better than this one is [this one = event closer (in time) to the speaker].

All well and good: nothing interesting here. What I found more interesting was the following cognitive effect. Consider two similar objects placed exactly equidistant from the speaker, say two color chips, or landscape photographs, depicting a tropical beach and alpine mountain. The speaker is then asked to say which color/picture he/she prefers. My intuition, which students seemed happy to accept, is that the preferred item is always construed with the more proximate deictic term, so that the sentences in (2) are acceptable, but those in (3) are anomalous.

2a. I really like this one more than that one.
2b. I don't like that one, but this one is fine.

3a. #I really like that one more than this one.
3b. #I don't like this one, but that one is fine.

In other words, even when physical distance is equal, we put emotional distance between us and the things we don't like, construing the things we like as closer. This observation is consistent with stronger emotional statements, such as:

4a. I really love these/?those people.
4b. I can't stand that man/?this man.

I assume there is some experimental work that validates this, perhaps also gesture work. If anyone has references, please let me know.