Abstract: Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life,not just in language,but also in thoughts and actions (Lakoff and Johnson,1980,1999). Our ordinary conceptual system,in terms of which we think and act,is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Thus,metaphors are not simply a rhetorical or communicative tool,but an important way to represent concepts. Spatial metaphors are a type of image schema metaphor that map spatial concepts in the source domain (e.g. up-down,front-back,center-periphery,etc.) onto abstract target domains (Lakens,Semin,& Foroni,2011; Lakoff & Turner,1989; Schubert,2005). Recently,spatial metaphors have received particular attention in the field of social cognition,because of its critical role in the formation of human moral concepts.
In the past,researchers paid more attention to the psychological reality of moral concept metaphors,and the influence of spatial position on the processing the (im)moral words. The current study focused on the influence of moral metaphors on the judgment of spatial relationships. We examine two issues:first,whether moral concept spatial metaphors exist in psychological reality; second,whether moral metaphors cause a bias in spatial relationship judgments.
The present study utilized a visuospatial relation judgments paradigm,namely the Bar-Dot task (Hellige & Michimata,1989; Katie & Itiel,2011). In this paradigm,participants were asked to estimate the position of a dot relative to a bar in three dimensions:above/below judgment (Experiment 1),near/far judgment (Experiment 2),and precise distance estimation (Experiment 3). The above/below judgment task requires participants to estimate whether a dot is above or below the bar. The accuracy and reaction time of estimation were recorded to provide a coarse spatial judgment. The near/far judgment task requires participants to judge whether the dot is within or outside of a specific distance (such as 3.5cm) of the bar and the number of far and near distance judgments was recorded. Relative to the above/below judgment task,the near/far judgment task includes judging a more refined spatial relationship. The precise distance estimation requires participants to accurately estimate the distance of a dot from the bar,and the estimated distance was recorded. Relative to the near/far judgment task that provides a qualitative estimate of cognitive bias (i.e.,whether near/far),the precise distance estimation task can provide a quantitative measure of cognitive biases (i.e.,how near/far).
The results showed that:(1) In the verticality (above/below) judgment,moral words were responded to faster than immoral words when the words were presented above the bar; in contrast,when the words were presented below the bar,immoral words were responded to faster; (2) in the proximity (near/far) judgment,more moral than immoral words were judged to be "far" (an upward bias) when words were presented above the bar; but when the words were presented below the bar, no significant bias was found for moral or immoral words; (3) in precise distance estimation,an overestimation was observed when participants were primed with moral words and an underestimation was observed when participants were primed with immoral words. The current results demonstrated that vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts influences various dimensions of our spatial relation judgments. The Study extend research on moral metaphor and embodied cognition by using Chinese traditional moral concepts and the classical spatial relation judgment task.

Key words: moral concepts, vertical spatial metaphor, spatial relation judgment