The Metaphorical Associations Of Moral Concept And Color Concept And Its Controllability

Metaphor is a commonly used language expression, it is people’s way of thinking. In real life, morality and black or white color has particular metaphorical Association, people tend to use specific black or white color of the concept to understand and characterize abstract moral concepts. At the same time, moral concept will have an impact on the perception of color.This paper is an empirical study based on conceptual metaphor theory, first reviews the conceptual metaphor research background, development process and main points of view. Then it lists the based on the related research of conceptual metaphor theory, summarizes the related research achievements of the predecessors, then summarize and analysis the status and existing problems of the moral color metaphor research. In this paper, I tend to explore the psychological reality of the moral color metaphor, controllability, metaphor of bidirectional metaphors and the influence factors through four experiments.Experiment 1 explored the psychological reality of moral black and white color metaphor. The real people’s faces as the experimental materials. The experimental results show that, subjects were more likely to make moral evaluation to black background pictures of faces, white face pictures to make moral evaluation, verify the moral and color exist specific metaphor.In experiment two, the controllability of moral mapping was discussed. The results showed that the mapping from the color to the moral was changed by the conscious suppression strategy.In experiment three, we discussed the effect of moral reflection on color. The results show that the moral concept can affect the color judgment, which proves that there is a reverse mapping of moral to color.In experiment four, the influence of the cover up on the color mapping is discussed. The experimental results show that, hide need to meet the conditions, the role of morality in the mapping of color changes,appears the compensation effect of metaphor. Thus, it is proved that the moral of color mapping functions can be controlled by covering up.In summary,through the experiment this study proved that the moral color metaphor connection has psychological reality and the bidirectional nature, and the bidirectional mapping relationship is controllable. This study broaden the moral color metaphor of the scope of the study, has certain significance to further deepen the conceptual metaphors related research.