Research On Chinese Human Cognition And Representation

Renqing is a concept of traditional Chinese culture, existing in people's social life with a long history. Everyone in the society has realized its existence, and used it to deal with different social environment and interpersonal relationship. However, only few people can give a precise definition of renqing. In order to solve this problem, indigenous psychology scholars have made a series of theoretical studies on it, and got a relatively unified result that renqing is a complex concept, with multiple levels. There are a few studies exploring the concepts connotation of renqing using empirical methods, but such researches also need to be enriched. On this basis, the purpose of this study is to launch a series of exploration about the conception of renqing and find out it's prototype.Study one by using the method of questionnaire, explores the concept level and prototype of renqing. The research is divided into two parts. The first part selects 20-40 years old Chinese people to make free association of renqing. The research collected 289 valid questionnaires, and 1090 renqing related words. The total frequency is 2976. Through the collation, the study finally gets 362 words, and the actual frequency is 2248, accounted for the total frequency of 75.5%. In the second part, the study uses 44 high frequency words from the first part to developed a structured questionnaire. In this part, the study collected 400 questionnaires. The exploratory factor analysis extracted 8 factors. After analysis,7 factors are retained, namely:emotional reaction, instrument value, bao, financial gifts, socialization, diversity-orderly, gifts given. Through cluster analysis, the study finds out the prototype of renqing.Study two using the method of experiment, verifies the renqing prototype. The subjects are 26-30 years old Chinese people and the 44 high frequency words from study one are the experimental materials. The 67 subjects were randomly divided into two groups, respectively received recall experiments and recognition experiments. Both of the recall and recognition experiments show that, the completion of the task of prototype is better than the peripheral words. This means that the prototype indeed closer to the concept of renqing.