“Inside or Outside”: The container schema of high and low barrier personalities. And remarks on Covid-19

By relating the exterior-interior model of body boundary awareness to Lakoff & Johnson’s (1999) in-out orientation of container-schematic conceptualisations, this study aims to explore the use of container-schematic imagery in the autobiographical memories of High and Low Barrier Personalities. The results of this study are based on a corpus of everyday autobiographical memories (N=488) and dream memories (N=450). The results demonstrated that, in both memory types, High Barrier personalities used more semantic fields representing concrete and metaphorical container-schematic imagery (Johnson, 1987), suggesting that the container schema is similar to the Barrier personality construct. The results are also discussed in reference to the Covid-19 pandemic.