Conceptual Metaphor Theory ( Cmt ) - 919 Words

Specific Aims Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff, Johnson, 1980) proposes that people use concrete experiences to represent abstract concepts through metaphorical mappings. Santiago and his colleagues (2012) reviewed the literatures on CMT, and summarized task effect called conceptual congruency. Conceptual congruency effect (CCE) indicates the task effect that while people do judgment on an abstract conceptual dimension, their performance can be influenced by the manipulation on a concrete conceptual dimension. In daily life language, color-emotion is a kind of commonly used conceptual metaphor. For example, English speakers use the metaphor seeing red to express angry emotion; as well as use the metaphor feeling blue to express sad emotion. We hypothesize that people have color-emotion metaphorical representation in their mind. Further, conceptual congruency effect will occur while people process the stimuli what have conflict information with the color-emotion metaphorical representation in their mind. A couple of hypothesis-driven experiments will be conducted to achieve the following two specific aims. Specific Aim1: Investigate neural correlates of conceptual congruency effect in color-emotion metaphorical representation of English speakers. The brain mechanism of conceptual congruency effect remains unclear. In this project, we will use fMRI technique to investigate which brain regions involve the conceptual congruency effect of mental metaphorical