Metaphoric Conceptualization of Interpersonal Trust

Since there is no agreement among researchers on how to conceptualizethe interpersonal trust, we analyzed the metaphoric expressions made by students about trust, identifying the conceptual metaphors, the most frequent dimensions of interpersonal trust that are the most frequent ones in these expressions, and establishing the possible relations among those dimensions. A survey was carried out on 61 students from Psychology and Nursery Departments. 124 metaphoric expressions related to 17 conceptual metaphors were found. Based on the analysis of metaphoric expressions we proposed 9 dimensions in the conceptualization of the term trust. The discussion is focused on the implicit meaning that the students assign to the interpersonal relationships.