Chinese Buddhism and Vertical Space Metaphoric Thinking

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.