The Temperature Of Words: A Study Of Cold And Hot Metaphors In News Events From An Embodied Perspective

The theory of embodied cognition points out that the body plays an important role in the cognitive process,and physical experience and corresponding activities not only provide cognitive content,but also affect the generation of cognition.According to the theory of conceptual metaphor,people usually understand unfamiliar and abstract target domain concepts through familiar and vivid source domain concepts.From a embodied perspective,the concept of the origin domain of a specific image is often closely related to the human body,often derived from body orientation,body movements,or physical perception as a reference.Therefore,after metaphorical mapping,concepts not only have intrinsic cognitive representations,but also contain components closely related to physical activity and psychological experience.With the in-depth development of the two theories,embodied conceptual metaphor has become an important research field in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.For example,in the Chinese context,people often use metaphors related to body temperature perception,such as "a good word that warms in three winters,and a bad word that hurts in six months",to express abstract emotions within.In recent years,the study of temperature metaphors from a personal perspective has emerged.In daily life,people are exposed to news information almost every day.For example,after reading the negative parts of the epidemic news report,it is easy to generate negative emotions such as sadness,anxiety,and powerlessness,which can lead to a "cold" psychological experience or temperature perception.Positive news events,such as reports that promote socialist values,social integrity,the truth,goodness,and beauty of human nature,and the excellent traditional Chinese culture,tend to inspire readers and excite them,resulting in a "warm" psychological experience or a sense of temperature.From the perspective of embodied cognition,the temperature metaphors contained in news events can activate readers’ physical experiences of warmth and cold,leading them to better understand the emotions,attitudes,and values conveyed in news events.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the relationship between news events and temperature metaphors through a embodied perspective.This study speculates that different body temperature perceptions can have an impact on individuals’ emotional emotions,and conversely,individuals’ emotional emotions can also have an impact on their body temperature perceptions.Reading,recalling,and writing news events with different emotional potencies may lead to different temperature experiences for readers.Based on this,this study used neutral news events,positive news events,and negative news event text materials as experimental materials for Study 1 and Study 2.The situational manipulation paradigm and mood elicitation paradigm were used to explore the two-way metaphorical mapping process between emotional valence and body temperature perception in news events,respectively.In Study 2,the basic empathy scale was used to explore the possible regulatory role of empathy in it.The third study continued to use the mood elicitation paradigm,allowing subjects to recall and write news events on their own,to explore whether the emotional valence contained in different news events would have a significant impact on water temperature preference.The results showed that:(1)Both hands exposed to hot and cold temperature stimuli significantly affected the judgment of emotional potency of news events,and subjects exposed to hot water cups scored significantly higher on the judgment of emotional potency of neutral news events than subjects exposed to cold water cups;(2)Reading news events with different emotional potencies significantly affected both hands’ perception of hot and cold stimuli.Subjects who read positive news events judged the water temperature in the cup significantly higher than those who read negative news events;(3)The consistency effect of the metaphorical mapping of hot and cold news events is bidirectional and robust;(4)The subjects’ empathy did not significantly regulate the metaphorical connection between news events and temperature;(5)The compensation effect of hot and cold metaphors in news events has not been fully verified,but the trend of metaphor compensation effect is dimly visible.Based on the above research evidence,the metaphor of hot and cold news events is established.The hot and cold metaphors of news events reflect a two-way mapping between the source domain(temperature)and the target domain(social emotion),and have a certain degree of robustness.Bidirectional mapping provides evidence of metaphorical congruence effects,but no evidence of metaphorical compensation effects has been provided.The discovery of hot and cold metaphors in news events has enriched the research results in the field of "temperature social emotional metaphors" and is worth further research.