The Influence Of Psychological Distance To Politeness Within Undergraduate Students

Psychological distance is a kind of inner experience. We define psychological distance as the extent of divergence from direct experience of me, here and now along the dimensions of time, space, social perspective, or hypotheticality. Psychological distance includes temporal, spatial, and social distances as well as hypotheticality. These four dimensions have internal consistency, there will be influence and contact each other. According to the construal level theory(CLT), People’s psychological distance is two-way correlated to the levels of mental representation, which can explain all of the dimensions of psychological distance.In interpersonal communication, Politeness is that people need to pay attention to the others public self-image and self-awareness, avoiding threat to the behavior of the face. Politeness includes six criteria, the tact maxim, the Generosity maxim, the approbation( or flattery) maxim, the modesty maxim the Agreement maxim,the Sympathy Maxim.When we study, we find if the social status and compulsory unchanged, psychological distance will directly affect the degree of politeness.Politeness in Chinese and western culture has certain differences, especially in terms of address terms, appreciate and praise, privacy and taboos. The purpose of this paper is to verify that under the culture of politeness, in spite of these differences, but the psychological distance if there is a significant influence on politeness.This study use research paradigm for psychological distance, and adopt self-assessment and others assessment in two ways for politeness. In the material,joined the address terms, appreciation and praise, respectively from the level of interpretation, the time distance, the influence of the space distance of politeness studied. Results: the high level of construal can lead to high degree of politeness; Distant in time and space distance will lead to the high degree of politeness; Although there are differences between the Chinese and western culture in the aspect of politeness phenomena, but the study results show that the construal level and psychological distance, Under the influence of Chinese culture also has a significant effect on politeness.