The Effect Of Attention On The Activation Of Power Conceptual Metaphor From The Perspective Of Multiple Metaphor

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory(Lakoff & Johnson,1980),metaphor is not only a literary figure of speech,but rather a way through which we express and understand abstract concepts by mapping the meaning and structure of a concrete concept to an abstract concept.Coherent Working Models(Santiago et al.,2012)considered conceptual metaphor as a flexible projection,and highlighted the crucial role of attention.As a commonly used abstract concept,power is defined as an individual's relative capacity to influence others' states by providing or withholding resources or implementing punishments(Keltner,Gruenfeld,& Anderson,2003).There have been transcultural evidences of power-vertical and power-size congruency.The present study intend to investigate the effect of attention on the activation of these two metaphors.The adopted Stroop paradigm was used in all the experiments.In Experiment 1,we tested the vertical(1A)and size(1B)metaphors of power in Chinese culture.The results showed that participants identified target faster when the target was powerful word and appeared on the top of the screen or in a bigger size.In Experiment 2,we investigated the activation condition of metaphors when two kinds of cues(i.e.vertical and size)existed simultaneously.The results showed that only vertical metaphor of power could be activated when the vertical information was task relevant,and size information was task irrelevant(2A),and only size metaphor existed when size information was task relevant(2B).These results indicate that only the metaphor representation with explicit attentional guidance can be activated in these kind of conditions.In order to explore whether the vertical(3A)and size(3B)metaphors of power can be activated without attention,we executed Experiment 3 with color-identification task which was irrelevant to power.But,surprisingly,we found significant power-color congruency in the experiment.Both vertical and size metaphors were absent without explicit attention,which identical to the results of Experiment 2.Experiment 4 continued to investigate the question in Experiment 3,with converting the red-blue color into blue-purple.Surprisingly,power-color congruency appeared again in Experiment 4A(vertical),but non of any cogruency effect appeared in 4B(size).We hypothesis that participants might construct a connection between the difference of power and the difference of color during the experiment.But in 4B,it is hard to build up such kind of connection due to the task difficulty.More research need to be done in order to uncover the reason.In conclusion,we found that individuals use vertical,size and color concepts to construct and understand power.Furthermore,only the metaphor representation with explicit attentional guidance can be activated in the condition of two kinds of power-related cues exist simultaneously.