The Experimental Research On Spatial Metaphor Of The Traditional Moral Concepts

Metaphor is a cognitive thinking mode, with the help of the familiar, specificconcepts to understand unfamiliar or abstract concepts. This study focuses on thevertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts. The up and down of the vertical space isfamiliar and specific, and the moral concept is relatively abstract.Experiment1use involuntary learning tasks, match the face pictures and moralwords, then memory them. After this, participants need to recognize that if the facepicture is conducted with the words. The results show that: the matching recognitionaccuracy is higher when the moral concepts and the face pictures are at the top ofscreen; the matching recognition accuracy is higher when the immoral concepts andthe face pictures are at the bottom of screen. Experiment2uses an activating start andfound that participates evaluate face pictures more moral when they are located upthan down of the screen. Experiment3use involuntary learning tasks, to memory thewords appeared at the screen. The recognition task is about whether the word isoccurred and its location. The results show that in the judgment tasks, when the wordsappear in the middle of the screen, the participants will recognize more moral wordsin upper part and more immoral words in down part.The following conclusion by three results of the experiments: moral concepts arerepresented metaphorically in Chinese. It was not only possible to mapping from thesource domain to the target domain, but also mapping at the opposite path.