The Mapping In Vertical Spatial Metaphor Of Moral Concepts

This study investigates the psychological reality of vertical spatial metaphor ofthe moral concepts and its bidirectional metaphor mapping through withfour experiments.Experiment1using the priming paradigm to explore the mapping mode ofvertical spatial metaphor of the moral concepts, which mapping from the sourcedomain to the target domain, namely the moral is up and the immoral is down.Theresults show that: the interaction of vocabulary types and spatial location was notsignificant, there was no significant difference in the subjects’ reaction time to theletters present at the top or bottom of the screen after they finish the judgement tomoral concept words, the moral concept vocabularies couldn’t make the judgingprocess of the letters in the corresponding space easy. Experiment2continue toexplore the mapping from source domain to the target domain of moral conceptsmetaphor in vertical spatial by consciously forced choice task. The subjects wereasked to read out the moral (immoral) words that in the center of the screen, then theyhad to select the Greek nonsense words present at the top and bottom of the screenwhich was considered with the same meaning to the former moral (immoral) words. Itshowed that: The subjects were tend to select the Greek nonsense words present atthe top of the screen after read out the moral words that in the center of the screen,meanwhile, when the words was immoral meaing, they prefer to select the nonsensewords that present at the bottom of the screen. Experiment3using the primingparadigm to investigate that in the spatial priming paradigm condition, the mappingmode of vertical spatial metaphor of the moral concepts was from the source domainto the target domain, namely the up is moral and the down is immoral. It shows that,after the space judgment of up, the participants’ reaction time of judgment onsubsequent moral words were significantly faster than the immoral; and the responseto the immoral words were significantly faster than moral words when the formerjudgment turned to be down. The spatial location facilitate the processing of thecorresponding moral words. Experiment4has explored whether the spatiallocation would affect the moral judgment. People were asked to make a morality judgment to the pictures with neutral emotional face which had been presented at thetop or bottom of the screen. The result shows that, people were more inclined to thinkthe pictures on the top of the screen was moral and the ones in the bottom wasimmoral. In other words, the spatial location had affected the moral judgment to thesame type of picture of the people.The results told that:(1)Vertical space metaphor of moral concept haspsychological reality.(2) Mapping mode of vertical space metaphor of moral conceptis flexible and bidirectional, It was not only possible to mapping from the sourcedomain to the target domain,but also mapping at the opposite path.