A Metaphor Of Raw And Cooked Food In The Interpersonal Relationships Of Chinese Society

Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but a process of conceptualization of the world. Growing studies have examined whether the social concepts can be understood in a metaphorical way. Food and culinary arts play an important role in the Chinese society they are not only crucial for survive, but also to some extent representing people’s thought and notion, thus become an unique cultural phenomenon-metaphor, it can be used to express the abstract concepts in speeches, ideas and thinking in a concrete way. Since the use of fire and cooking the food was an important milestone in the human history. Through the investigation of cognitive linguistics, researchers found that the "raw/cooked" concept that initially arose from the diet culture was gradually extented to all areas of theory and practice, and become a well established classification and analysis framework of Chinese society and culture. People keep using it to o interpret of many other important and specific natural, social and cultural phenomenon, thus constantly forming new knowledge. There is a subtle link between interpersonal relationships in Chinese society of "stranger" and "raw food","acquaintance" and "cooked food". In the present study, the food metaphor of the interpersonal relationship of Chinese society was discussed. The results showed that, in the psychological processing, metaphors can be used continuously and automatically, even without the involvement of consciousness.There are two experiments in current research. Experiment1utilized the priming paradigm to investigate the mapping between the food and the interpersonal relationships, with the pictures of "raw food" and "cooked food" used as prime, and the faces of strangers and friends adopted as targets. Experiment2recruited the Morph paradigm, in which faces of strangers and friends of each participants were mixed with different ratio to making a series of Morphing movies to investigate whether the subjects’assessments of "raw food" and "cooked food" would affect their judgments on the nature of faces of the Morphing movie sequences.Results of experiment1showed that at the condition of taking the "raw food" as prime, there was no significant difference in reaction time between the response to stranger faces and familiar faces. Whereas, when the "cooked food" was primes, the reaction time for familiar faces was significantly shorter than the reaction time for strange faces. This indicates that there was raw food primed the concept of stragne and the cooked food primed the concept of familiar.Results of experiment2showed that when the Morphing movie change from friends to strangers, participants who assessed "raw food" previously judged the face as more like a stranger earlier. On the other hand, when the Morphing movie changed from strangers to friends, participants who assessed "raw food" taken more time than participants who assessed "cooked food" in judging the face as a friend.These results showed that among Chinese participants, the metaphorical relationship between "raw food"/"cooked food" and interpersonal relationships is truly exist."Cooked food" means "familiar", while the raw food’s metaphorical mapping was not clearly proved in this study. What’ more, the results suggested that metaphors occurred automatically, even without the conscious effort. These result confirmed notion that the content of "raw" and "cooked" in Chinese diet extent beyond the physical survival. It has become a way to view things, perceive realities, and determine how do we develop and interact with others in this societys.