The Bidirectional Representing In Horizontal Interpersonal Distance Metaphor Of Moral Concepts

The current study adopts the priming paradigm to explore the moral conceptual metaphor to characterize the horizontal representation of interpersonal distance.Experiment 1 examined the mapping mechanism of horizontal interpersonal distance metaphor of the moral concepts, which mapping from the source domain to the target domain, namely the moral is close and the immoral is far. Results show that:(1) from behavioral data: participants judge long-range(vs. close-range) character cartoon faster after immoral word processing.(2) ERPs data is consistent with the results from behavior: ①in the left brain region, the P2 induced by close(vs. far) horizontal spatial distance between cartoon character has more positive going after processing the immoral word; ②N400 average amplitude analysis show that a close-distance induce more negative N400 than that of far-distance, the right hemisphere is more negative than the left hemisphere, N400 on midline is the most negative, only N400 in the left area shows consistent trend comparing with P2 and the result of behavior.Experiment 2 test whether the other metaphoric representation direction of interpersonal distance exists in moral concepts( from the target domain to the source domain) with the same experimental paradigm by ERPs study.(1) Behavioral data show that participants response faster to the moral word( vs. Immoral) after priming close-distance, and faster to the immoral word( vs. moral) after priming far-distance.(2) ERPs results: ① The average amplitude of P2 component analysis show close-distance significantly more positive than that of far-distance; immoral words evoked more positive P2 than moral words; the midline-region has the largest P2 amplitude, which show that a larger P2 is evoked by immoral( vs. moral) words after being presented a close-distance characters cartoon anteriorly. ② Average amplitude of N400 shows that the right lateral area has the most negative going in the five partition; only in the left lateral area, there is a trend showing inconsistent conditions induce more negative N400 than the consistent conditions.All the above data from behavior and ERPs show that:(1) moral concepts are partly represented metaphorically in Chinese interpersonal distance, that is to say, there exists “immoral is far” but not “moral is close”; there exists “close is moral” but not “far is immoral”.(2) The horizontal interpersonal distance representation of moral concepts in Chinese is partly bidirectional, it is incomplete and is subject to the social and cultural impact: In Chinese, From the source domain to the target domain, the mapping is "immoral is far" is presented; while from the target domain to the source domain, the mapping is "close is moral".(3) The psychological structure and processing mechanisms of the two representation direction maybe different, the mapping of “source domain to target domain” is much easier than the other representation direction of the metaphor.