Chinese Buddhism and Vertical Space Metaphoric Thinking

ABSTRACT

Prior research indicated the association between religious concepts and perceptions of vertical positions may exist in Tibetan Buddhism. This study extends this view by investigating whether such an evaluation tendency also adapts to Chinese Buddhism. We employed explicit/implicit measures involving 305 participants in two studies. In Study 1, we used forced-choice method to explore whether the Chinese Buddhist-related concepts were represented by vertical spatial metaphors explicitly. In study 2a/b, we used the IAT to assess the religion-vertical relationship implicitly, and also exploring whether there are differences between believers and nonbelievers. Study 1 revealed that all participants tended to put Buddhist-related concepts on the above vertical position, but believers were more inclined to put religious concepts on the above vertical position than nonbelievers. Study 2a/b showed that participants were faster at categorizing Buddhist-related words when they were paired with up-related words and Devil-related words when they were paired with down-related words. However, there was a split between believers and nonbelievers from the results of the analysis of variance. These results revealed that the association of Buddhist-related concepts and vertical spatial metaphoric terms exists in Han population, and intensity of the association was moderated by the strength of belief in Buddhism.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants who contributed to the present research.

Author contributions

Conceptualization: [Fang Guan, Outong Chen, Kaiping Peng], Methodology: [Fang Guan, Shanyin Li], Formal analysis and investigation: [Fang Guan, Shanyin Li], Writing – original draft preparation: [Fang Guan]; Writing – review and editing: [Fang Guan, Outong Chen, Yan Zhang], Funding acquisition: [Fang Guan], Resources: [Kaiping Peng], Supervision: [Kaiping Peng].

Data availability statement

We uploaded the data-collection plan to the Open Science Framework (OSF) website, and data files with the cleaned data and materials in three studies were also available (https://osf.io/jsfhv/).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical standards

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Research Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology at Tsinghua University (No.: 2022/02).

Informed consent statement

All participants gave their informed consent before their inclusion in the study.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2024.2344911. The are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2024.2344911.

Notes

¹ The results hold up when the analyzes are run without the covariates.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Youth Foundation for Humanities and Social Science Research of the Ministry of Education [22YJC730001].