Research On The Bright And Dark Metaphor Of Hope Concepts

The formation and representation of abstract concepts has always been one of the focuses in the field of cognitive science.With the rise of embodied cognition and experiential philosophy,there is a new entry point for the study of abstract concepts.According to the conceptual metaphor theory,metaphor can help to understand complex abstract concepts by linking concrete perceptual experience at the level of body schemas to abstract concepts.In life,hope concepts appear more frequently in the abstract concept system of individuals,and it is reflected in Chinese ancient poems,Chinese idioms,and other Chinese cultures with a greater metaphorical association with bright and dark.Therefore,this study conjectures that expressing the hope concepts in terms of bright and dark is not a coincidental phenomenon,but rather people have established a stable cognitive structure between the two.Based on the analysis of relevant theories and literature,this study intends to explore the bright and dark metaphorical representations of hope concepts from different perspectives through four experiments.Experiment 1 used the Stroop experimental paradigm to explore the influence of bright and dark perception from the source domain to the target domain on the processing of hope concepts.The results showed that subjects responded significantly faster to judgments of bright high-hope words than to dark high-hope words,and significantly slower to judgments of bright low-hope words than to dark low-hope words.In other words,the brightness of words interfered with the judgment of word parts of speech to a certain extent.Experiment 2 used the color block priming paradigm to further explore whether the target domain to the source domain,that was,whether hope concepts processing could have a reverse interference effect on bright and dark perception.The results showed that,with the actual brightness and darkness of the color block and the words identical,the ratio of subjects to judge the high-hope words to be brighter than the paired color blocks was significantly greater than the rate of random selection,while the ratio of the low-hope words to be brighter than the paired color blocks was significantly less than the rate of random selection.Subjects’ perception of the brightness of words was interfered by the meaning of words.Experiment 1 and experiment 2 confirmed that the existence of "high-hope and bright" and "low-hope and dark" metaphorical links between bright and dark perceptions and hope concepts from the perspective of metaphorical consistency,but was there any difference in the strength of the links? Based on this problem,experiment 3 used the lexical translation matching experimental paradigm to explore the difference of metaphorical association strength between "high-hope and bright" and "low-hope and dark".The results showed that the association strength between "high-hope and bright" and "low-hope and dark" was different,and the association strength was stronger for "high-hope and bright".Experiment 4 used the mood inducing paradigm to further explore whether the metaphorical mapping still existing when given a complex specific social background,so as to verify whether the bright and dark metaphorical representations of hope concepts was social.The results showed that subjects who performed low-state hope priming gave lower scores to the brightness of the experimental environment on subsequent environmental item scores compared to subjects who performed high-state hope priming in the experiment.There was no significant difference between the two groups in the scores of temperature and air quality.Hope concepts priming interfered with subjects’ perception of environmental brightness.The metaphorical representation of hope concepts of bright and dark was social.Based on the above four experiments,the following conclusions are obtained from this study.(1)There is a metaphorical association between hope concepts and bright-dark concepts,and individuals tend to associate high-hope with bright and low-hope with dark.(2)The metaphorical association between hope concepts and bright-dark concepts is bidirectional.There is not only a mapping from the source domain of bright and dark to the target domain of hope,but also a mapping from the target domain of hope to the source domain of bright and dark.(3)The metaphorical association strength of "high-hope and bright" and "lowhope and dark" is different.The metaphorical association strength of "high-hope and bright" is more stable and stronger than that of "low-hope and dark".(4)The metaphorical representation of hope concepts of bright and dark is social.