Color Metaphor Representation Of Chinese Emotional Words And Its Impact On Color Perception

The formation and representation of abstract concepts are always the one ofhotspot problems to the field of Cognitive Science. Such as emotion, time and socialstatus these abstract concepts, they are invisible for people, then how to peopleacquire and represent these abstract concepts? It is contended by the ConceptualMetaphor Theory that people conceptualize their abstract concepts in concreteperceptual terms. Embodied theories of cognition hold that the formation of theconcept is rooted in the general bodily experience, people’s basic concepts from theperceptual experience, which mainly comes from people’s physical experience. InChinese, people often use color words to express human emotion. Based onConceptual Metaphor Theory and Embodied theories of Cognition views, ourresearch focus on the representation of color and emotion concepts in Chineselanguage.In the present research, we design three experiments to discuss color metaphorrepresentation of Chinese emotional words and its impacts on color perception.Study1, we sought to determine whether Chinese people have implicit positive-redand negative-black associations, which existing in their memory. On this basis, instudy2we sought to determine whether color metaphor representation would impacton judgment of individuals to subsequent object’s color. Study3a and3b extended thisfinding using a perceptual matching task that had an objectively correct response.The results indicated (1) Chinese people have implicit positive-red andnegative-black associations, which existing in their memory. The experimental resultssupported the Conceptual Metaphor Theory.(2) Study2and study3showed that thepositive-red and negative-black association also worked on people’s color perception,the activation of association biased the judgment of a subsequent object’s color, whichis in a metaphor-consistent direction.(3)Negative-black association has the universality across cultures, while positive-red association reflects the culturecharacteristics of Chinese.