Morphological Metaphor Mapping of Moral Concepts in Chinese Culture

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Yingjie Liu¹  Kang Li¹  Lina Li¹  Jing Zhang¹  Yuerui Lin¹  Baxter DiFabrizio²  He Wang¹ 

[1] School of Psychology, North China University of Science and Technology;College of William and Mary, United States

关键词: moral concept;    shape;    rotation;    Chinese culture;    conceptual metaphor theory;    morphological metaphor;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.554061

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

According to conceptual metaphor theory, individuals are thought to understand or express abstract concepts by using referents in the physical world—right and left for moral and immoral, for example. In this research, we used a modified Stroop paradigm to explore how abstract moral concepts are metaphorically translated onto physical referents in Chinese culture using the Chinese language. We presented Chinese characters related to moral and immoral abstract concepts in either non-distorted or distorted positions (Study 1) or rotated to the right or to the left (Study 2). When we asked participants to identify the Chinese characters, they more quickly and accurately identified morally positive characters if they were oriented upright or turned to the right and more quickly and accurately identified immoral characters when the characters were distorted or rotated left. These results support the idea that physical cues are used in metaphorically encoding social abstractions and moral norms and provided cross-cultural validation for conceptual metaphor theory, which would predict our results.

【 授权许可】

CC BY