Аннотация:Category labels affect people’s judgments regarding mental disorders which areunknown to them. Descriptions of these ‘unknown’ disorders that do have a name,are assumed by people to be more stable and having reasons to exist, when comparedwith the same descriptions of disorders - without a specific name. However, it isnot clear whether this effect can be evoked by other linguistic parameters, forinstance, by metaphors. We hypothesized that including a metaphor in the descriptionof a mental disorder would lead to the same effect even without a category name. Wereplicated a study by Giffin and colleagues’ and added a new experimental conditionin which participants read texts with the descriptions of a person’s unusual behaviourwithout the disorder's name, but with its metaphoric description. After reading thetexts, participants assessed a few statements concerning some characteristics of thedisorder. The results showed that the effect of a category label was replicated, and themetaphoric description also evoked a significant effect, but it was found in judgmentsof different characteristics of the disorder.