Metaphor and affective empathy are both deeply integral to human life. They are also two equally complex and mysterious mental processes. There are many reasons to think the two may be related to one another. According to Lakoff (2014), metaphor involves conceptualising a target concept in terms of a source concept, mapping conceptual information from source to target to facilitate understanding. Target concepts are usually embodied experiences which are often affective in nature. Modell (2003) notes that before language even develops, similar processes seem to enable the strong affective attunement between infants and primary caregivers. Further, the two processes are often associated in various ways throughout the clinical literature. It may be that affective empathy works via metaphorical conceptual mappings of others’ affective states onto our own. If so, we hypothesised that affective empathy could positively prime performance in a metaphor comprehension task. 84 participants were recruited to take part in two blocks of a task involving interpreting the metaphorical and literal meanings of 48 sentence pairs. There were four conditions in which affective empathy was manipulated in different ways. Mean reaction time and accuracy in the metaphor task were measured and compared using a series of ANOVA tests. Overall, it was found that, contrary to our hypothesis, there was a significant negative priming effect of affective empathy on reaction time in the metaphor task. No effect of affective empathy on accuracy was found. We conclude with a discussion of these results and suggestions for future research.