Lu Lifeng, Schubert Thomas W, Zhu Lei
Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Handan Road 220, Shanghai, SH, 200433, People's Republic of China.
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, P.O Box 1094, Blindern, 0317, Oslo, Norway.
Cogn Process. 2017 Nov;18(4):375-385. doi: 10.1007/s10339-017-0814-9. Epub 2017 May 9.
Previous evidence demonstrates that power is mentally represented as vertical space by adults. However, little is known about how power is mentally represented in children. The current research examines such representations. The influence of vertical information (motor cues) was tested in both an explicit power evaluation task (judge whether labels refer to powerless or powerful groups) and an incidental task (judge whether labels refer to people or animals). The results showed that when power was explicitly evaluated, vertical motor responses interfered with responding in children and adults, i.e., they responded to words representing powerful groups faster with the up than the down cursor key (and vice versa for powerless groups). However, this interference effect disappeared in the incidental task in children. The findings suggest that children have developed a spatial representation of power before they have been taught power-space associations formally, but that they do not judge power spontaneously.
先前的证据表明，成年人会将权力在心理上表征为垂直空间。然而，对于儿童如何在心理上表征权力却知之甚少。当前的研究考察了此类表征。在一项明确的权力评估任务（判断标签所指的是无权群体还是有权群体）和一项附带任务（判断标签所指的是人还是动物）中，均测试了垂直信息（动作线索）的影响。结果显示，当对权力进行明确评估时，垂直动作反应会干扰儿童和成年人的反应，即他们使用向上光标键对代表有权群体的词语做出反应的速度比对代表无权群体的词语做出反应的速度更快（反之亦然）。然而，这种干扰效应在儿童的附带任务中消失了。研究结果表明，儿童在正式学习权力与空间的关联之前就已经形成了权力的空间表征，但他们不会自发地判断权力。
