小学儿童诚信概念的垂直隐喻发展：认知表征与行为外化的差异

The Vertical Metaphor Development of Integrity in Primary School Children: Differences between Cognitive Representation and Behavioral Externalization

摘要: 本研究从认知表征与社会行为两个维度出发，考察小学儿童诚信概念的垂直隐喻发展。实验一采用迫选范式，结果显示，小学二年级儿童已初步建立“上–诚信、下–不诚信”的空间隐喻联结，且该联结随年级逐步增强。实验二采用图片启动范式，在学业情境中检验空间隐喻对诚信行为的影响。结果发现，垂直启动对诚信行为的整体作用较弱，且未表现出稳定的年龄效应。综合两项实验结果，研究提示小学儿童诚信发展可能呈现出“认知先行、行为滞后”的特征，并尝试提出“表征–价值–控制”的三链条解释性框架。本研究为理解诚信概念的具身认知基础及其行为外化的边界条件提供了经验材料，并对教育情境中如何在不同动机水平下促进儿童诚信行为具有一定的启示意义。

Abstract: This study examined the vertical metaphor development of integrity in primary school children from the perspectives of cognitive representation and social behavior. Experiment 1 employed a forced-choice paradigm and found that children in Grade 2 had already established an “up-integrity, down-dishonest” spatial metaphor, which gradually strengthened across grades. Experiment 2 used a picture-priming paradigm to test the effect of vertical spatial cues on integrity behavior in an academic context. The results indicated that the overall effect of vertical priming on integrity behavior was weak and did not exhibit a stable age-related pattern. Taken together, the findings suggest that the development of integrity in elementary school children may be characterized by “an asynchrony between cognitive representation and behavioral expression, such that cognitive representations precede behavioral enactment”. On the basis of these results, the present study tentatively proposes a “representation-value-control” interpretive framework to account for the relationship between integrity-related representations and behavior. The findings provide empirical evidence for the embodied cognitive basis of the integrity concept and help delineate the boundary conditions under which such representations are translated into behavior, offering implications for promoting integrity-related behavior in educational settings under varying motivational conditions.