Emotion And Moral Judgment Under Metaphor Of High And Low Position

Morality is a great achievement of the development of human civilization.The study found that the experience accumulated by the daily body will affect the moral concept,and form the individual moral abstract concept through the mechanism of metaphorical connection.As far as embodied cognition is concerned,it is devoted to the study of how the metaphorical connection between abstract complex concepts and physical experience is formed and how the mechanism operates.In the context of moral metaphor of spatial dimension,the current research on moral judgment under location metaphor mainly focuses on the top and the bottom,but in daily life,vertical space actually has high and low in addition to the top and the bottom.Moreover,in the context of Chinese culture,relative to up and down,the existence of height in vertical space is also a common moral description,such as "noble" and "vulgar".Is there metaphorical effect in high and low dimensions? We don’t know.Moreover,in the face of different moral problems,the effects of metaphor in the same dimension may not be completely consistent.The current research mainly adopts the general immoral problems,and the dilemma moral situation is usually more complicated than the general immoral problems,which will spend more time and cognitive resources in the moral judgment involving individuals.At the same time,in real life,individuals are faced with more moral problems which are also left and right dilemma.Faced with the moral dilemma that can not be easily judged,the protagonist’s practice and its opposite have certain reasonable reasons,so it is difficult to make a judgment.Therefore,on the basis of previous studies,this study attempts to use a variety of moral judgment materials to explore the psychological reality of moral metaphors in vertical space.Emotion has been proved to play an indispensable role in the field of moral metaphor and moral judgment,but there is a lack of empirical research in the specific dimension of moral metaphor.And in the face of the rich variety of human emotions,there is still a lack of exploring the role of specific types of emotions in moral metaphor.In addition,the role of emotion in metaphorical mechanism is not clear and needs to be further clarified.Emotion regulation strategy can regulate emotion,thus affect the judgment and behavior,and may also reduce the impact of moral metaphor on us,so as to make more objective moral judgment.Therefore,this study attempts to incorporate emotion into the study of high and low position moral metaphor,and introduce a new variable,emotion regulation strategy,to further explore the role and influence of emotion in moral metaphor.In this study,three experiments were designed to investigate the psychological reality of moral metaphor in vertical space and the role of emotion in it.Experiment 1 referred to and improved Yi Lanxin’s(2017)picture priming paradigm to test whether the moral concept was judged according to the metaphor of "high position is moral,low position is immoral";Experiment 2 introduced the variable of emotion on the basis of Experiment 1 to explore the differences between positive and negative emotions in high and low positions and the role of emotion in position and moral judgment In Experiment 3,we still used the picture priming paradigm to investigate the influence of emotion regulation strategies on moral judgment in vertical space,and further explored the role of emotion in the whole metaphorical mechanism.The results are as follows:(1)There are moral metaphors in vertical space,which affect the judgment of moral problems.The subjects in the high position are more strict in moral judgment,while the subjects in the low position are more tolerant of moral judgment.There is a moral metaphor effect of "high position moral,low position immoral".The type of moral judgment will affect the moral judgment of the subjects.The subjects think that the protagonists in moral dilemma stories are more moral,and that the moral level of the protagonists in general immoral stories is lower.(2)Compared with high position,low position will lead to higher anger,aversion to negative emotions.Anger has a masking effect between the vertical spatial position and the judgment of general immoral behavior.(3)Emotion regulation strategies affect the moral decision-making of individuals in the low position of vertical space.Cognitive reappraisal makes the individual’s moral judgment score lower in the low position,and becomes more objective from the original tolerance.