A Comparative Study On The Representation Of Emotional Color Metaphors In Normal Children And Moderate People With Mental Retardation

Modern cognitive development theory holds that metaphor is a cognitive approach. The metaphor is generated by the mapping between the source domain and target domain. The color metaphor is the mapping of color domains to other cognitive domains. The color metaphors express new concepts through color, mapping things without color. In the human language, there are a large number of symbols which record the color-color words. They are always linked with the objective things with colors to express certain things and reflect the color of things. If the concept of language is metaphorical, the same concept through visual means is also a metaphorical.Children’s painting is the projection of the children’s emotional state. For children, the painting is a non-verbal expression to express their inner feelings through line, color and composition. Many psychologists use the painting as a psychometric tool to understand the children’s inner feelings and emotional state.Color is the language of emotion and children can express their emotions and feelings through color. This study randomly selected39normal children in the4-5years old, and matched with the normal children’s mental age of41moderately retarded children in the10-16years old. Subjects were required to complete a color preference experiment, matching tasks, color-emotion matching task and the theme painting. The four experiments progressively examine the characteristics of the characterization of the emotional color of normal children with moderate mental retardation children’s painting metaphor, and then compare the characterization of the characteristics of the metaphor of emotional colors in both paintings.The results of color preference experiment show that normal children and moderately retarded children’s preferences on the10kinds of color (red, pink, yellow, dark green, light green, dark blue, light green, black, gray, brown) are consensus in general. They all like bright colors and don’t like the dim deep color, but they are different in the preference for yellow, compared to moderately retarded children, normal children love yellow.Found by the color-emotion matching task, different colors have different emotional significances for normal children and moderately retarded children. They have the ability to discover the relationship between color and mood. Normal children prefer to contact light color with happy mood, while prefer to contact light blue and the dim deep color with sad mood. Moderately retarded children prefer to contact light color with happy mood, while prefer to contact the dim deep color with sad mood. Moderately retarded children prefer to contact the dim deep color with sad mood more than normal children.Found by the theme painting task, normal children and moderately retarded children can understand the meaning of the metaphor of emotional color, and they can map emotions with painting through color. Normal children in the state of happy mood prefer to use bright colors, but in the state of sad mood prefer to use light blue and dim deep color. Moderately retarded children in the state of happy mood prefer to use bright colors, but in the state of sad mood prefer to use light blue and dim deep color. Moderately retarded children in the state of sad mood prefer to use the dim deep color more than normal children.For normal children and moderately retarded children, color preferences and emotional color metaphor are connected. They all prefer to contact their favorite color and bright colors with happy mood, while prefer to contact colors who don’t like and dim deep color with sad mood.