Metaphorical Representation Of Moral Concepts:evidence From Red/White Color,Left/Right Position And Upright/Skew Font

Individuals comprehend abstractions by representing it with concrete things.In this framework,the essence of metaphor is that people use specific experiences to construct abstract concepts.From the metaphor perspectives,embodied metaphor of abstract moral concepts were popular in human daily life.Embodied metaphor of abstract moral concepts were popular in humanity daily life.After plentiful Cognitive Semantics analysis,Wu nianyang and Hao jing found that,morality metaphor representation mainly contained space?cleaning?temperature?size? weight dimensions and so on[1].Many previous studies found that the abstract concept of “morality” was embodied within black and white color as well as up and down vertical space.However,few studies had focused on examining red and white color,left and right position,and upright and skew font in metaphor of morality.The present study were comprised of three Stroop experiments with undergraduates to test whether metaphoric representation of morality was associated with white and red color,left and right position,and upright and skew font.A matching effect appeared between moral/immoral terms with red/white color,and between moral/immoral terms with left/right position,and between moral/immoral terms with upright/skew font.The research results were as follows:(1)In Experiment 1,results indicated that,when moral words appeared in red color,and when immoral words appeared in white color,participants' response times have no significant difference.In other words,participants didn't show the tendency to associate moral words with white color,and associate immoral words with red color.(2)The results of Experiment 2 showed a significant Stroop effect.When moral words were presented on the right position and immoral words presented on the left position,reaction times were more significantly reduced than when moral words were presented on the left position and immoral words presented on the right position.(3)In Experiment 3,different vocabulary font(upright and skew)was designed to show morality-related(moral and immoral)words.It showed that,response times were longer when immoral words appeared in upright font than when immoral words appeared in skew font;and responses times were longer when moral words appeared in skew fontthan when moral words appeared in upright font.(4)In these three experiments,results showed that participants' response times were longer when appeared in immoral words than when appeared in moral words.It indicated that individuals had the tendency to notice immoral words.