The Weight Of The Guilty:Research On The Weight Metaphor Of Gulit Emotion

With the rise of embodied emotions,researchers have expanded their research on emotions from the perspective of the body.The process of emotional cognition is inseparable from physical perception and sentient experience.The sense of weight is a perception experience that we form in understanding the world and interacting with the environment.Guilt is an important social moral emotion,which is closely related to weight perception.The "weight of guilt" proposed in this article is in line with the theory of embodied emotion.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Embodied Cognition Theory,this research adopts different experimental tasks,starting from the relationship between weight metaphor and guilt emotion,exploring the influence of weight perception on guilt and its bidirectionality of metaphorical mapping.The current research consists of two studies.Study 1 tests the effect of weight sense on guilt.Starting from conceptual metaphor,Study 1a uses priming paradigm to explore the influence of priming with different weights on the judgment of guilt words.The results show that subjects responded significantly faster in the consistent conditions than that of the inconsistent conditions.Starting from embodied cognition.Study 1b uses the method of changing the weight of the backpack to manipulate the weight perception of subjects,exploring whether the weight of backpack and emotional start can cause an increase in guilt.It is found that before the guilt is induced,there is no significant difference in guilt scores between the light backpack group and the heavy backpack group.After inducing guilt,the scores of the guilt scale of the light backpack group and the heavy backpack group are significantly different,the heavy backpack group gets significantly higher scores in the guilt scale than that of the light backpack group.Study 2 tests the reverse metaphor of guilt for weight judgment.Study 2a uses the priming paradigm to verify the reverse metaphorical effect of weight and the concept of guilt.It is found that the subjects do not differ significantly when they respond under the consistent and inconsistent conditions.When the primingstimulus is the concept of guilt,it does not affect the judgement of the sense of weight.Study 2b uses the emotion-induced paradigm to explore the influence of guilt-induced on weight judgment.The results show that the judgement for object weight of subjects in the guilt-induced group is more heavily than that of the neutral emotion control group.The conclusions of the study are as follows:(1)The influence of weight on guilt concepts is one-way mapping,and the specific concept(weight)affects the judgment of abstract concepts(guilt words).(2)The sense of weight and guilt are bidirectional in the metaphor mapping.Not only does the sense of weight have an effect on the increase of guilt,whereas,the induction of guilt can also have an effect on the object weight for the individual to estimate.