The Temporal Focus’ Influence On Temporal Self-orientation Under Chinese Subjects

When people understand abstract concepts, they often use someting familiar and specific to think and describe them, a process known as metaphor. Time as an abstract concept, often described by some specific things such as space, money and so on, the most common temporal metaphor is the spacial-temporal metaphor, this phenomenon can be found in a variety of cultural backgrounds and in Chinese corpus sentences, such as "May come before June," "offspring" and so on, these statements contained in the "before", "after" and other spacial words to describe time, this space of time thinking and words to characterize the phenomenon called special temporal metaphor. Special temporal Metaphor can be divided into a variety of categories, including a widely used type is divided into time-reference and ego-reference, time-reference is a time series composed by a series of events, the earlier time in the previous time and the later in the back, ego is not included in this type. Ego-reference is the perspective of ego-perception,It can be divided into ego-moving metaphor and time-moving metaphor. This study will discuss the issue of self-orientation, that is, from the perspective of ego, what is in front of the ego, the past or the future. Temporal self-orientation is flexible, it is affected by a lot of factors, this study will discuss how temporal focus have an impact on the time of self-orientation. Temporal focus is how much time and attention will be allocated to the past, present or future, due to the different concerns of the time, people’s attitudes, decisions, behavior, motivation will be affected. This study will explore the relationship between the Temporal focus and time of self-orientation under Chinese subjects, whether the Temporal focus will affect the subjects’ time of self-orientation, The hypothesis is that the people focus on the future tend to put the future in front of themselves, people focus on the past tend to put the past in front of themselves. In order to verify the above hypothesis, two experiments were designed.1. To investigate the temporal focus and time of self-orientation correlation, selected 129 subjects, task one and task tow will be accomplished. The purpose of task one is to observe the Time Self-orientation(toward the past or the future) of subjects, the second task is to measure the time focus on subjects point(focus on the past or in the future), the experimental results show that the relevant of temporal focus and time of self-orientation can be found.2. The experiment two used as voice of response time as dependent to explore the relationship between the temporal focus and time of self-orientation, two groups of subjects are come from the past and future temporal focus, their task is to response on different time metaphor mode by voice response, the results showed that the group focus on the future responsed quickly under the future in the front metaphor mode, and the group focus on the past responsed quickly under the past in the front metaphor mode, And the difference was significant.