The Metaphors Of Red And Green In The Context Of Achievement And Their Activation Mechanism

As the core research content of cognitive semantics,metaphor has always caught the attention.Color is a kind of meaning carrier,and its metaphor is influenced by various aspects such as cultural background.Psychologists have done a lot of research on the metaphorical meaning of color,such as the metaphorical representation of color on moral concepts,the influence of color on emotions,the metaphor of color versus power concept and so on.As a pair of the most basic and most common contrast colors,the metaphorical meanings of red and green have traditionally been the hotspots of research.However,due to the influence of cultural background and specific situations,the metaphorical meanings of red and green have not yet reached a unified conclusion.Learned association theory and color-in-context theory have theoretical explanations for the formation mechanism of color metaphors,and both believe that color metaphor is a type of acquired meaning.Connected and influenced by the social environment and cultural background.However,the twotheories do not explore the process and the way of the color metaphor.This study aims to explore two questions:(1)What are the metaphorical meanings of red and green in the achievement context in Chinese culture?(2)whether the initiation of color metaphor is automatic and unconscious.There are three specific research contents:First,look into the implications of red and green for the broader concept of positive and negative.This part adopts the reaction-time paradigm,and requires the subjects to make judgments on the positive and negative words with color(red or green),and determine whether red and green contain positive or negative metaphors through the difference in response-time.Second,it discusses whether the metaphors of red and green are consistent with the metaphors of positive and negative concepts in a specific achievement context.In this part,the response time paradigm is still adopted,and the subjects are required to respond to the success word and the failure word with color(red or green)by pressing the key,and the difference in response-time is used to determine whether the red word and the green word contain the metaphor of success and failure.Third,we explore whether unconscious perception of color can initiate color metaphor.In this part of the experiment,the unconscious priming paradigm was adopted,that is,the color stimulus was at the level of unconscious perception,and the subjects were required to respond to the success and failure words by pressing the key under this condition,and the conclusion was drawn by comparing the differences in response-time.The results show that:(1)in a specific achievement context,red can be used as a metaphor for failure,but not for success.Green contains neither a metaphor for success nor a metaphor for failure.In the broader concept of positive and negative,neither red nor green is metaphorical.(2)conscious color perception can stimulate color meaningful association,but unconscious color perception cannot initiate color metaphorical processing.