A study published in 2000, observed that "the processing of the concrete domain of space could modulate the processing of the abstract domain of time, but not the other way around." The frequent use of a mental metaphor connects it to the abstract concept and helps the mind to store non-concrete informations in the long-term memory. Boroditsky has also done research on metaphors and their relation to crime. Her work has suggested that some conventional and systematic metaphors influence the way people reason about the issues they describe. For instance, previous work has found that people were more likely to want to fight back against a crime "beast" by increasing the police force but more likely to want to diagnose and treat a crime "virus" through social reform.