Wang Can, Zhang Zhijun, Chen Yejin, Huang Mengzhu, Tang Rixin
The Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, The People's Republic of China.
The Department of Psychology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310018, The People's Republic of China.
Exp Brain Res. 2025 May 15;243(6):146. doi: 10.1007/s00221-025-07103-x.
Power perceptions reflect citizens' attitudes toward social hierarchies and power inequality, whereas power metaphors reflect the cognitive process of a personal sense of power. This study examines the influence of power representations on grasp aperture in East Asian participants. In experiment 1 (n = 34), we investigated whether powerful institutional position words trigger larger grasp apertures compared to less powerful words, indicating a correlation between power and spatial dimensions. Our results demonstrate that powerful words indeed led to larger grasp apertures, suggesting a direct association between power and size representation. In experiment 2 (n = 20), the results indicate that this effect persisted even when institutional positions were not described by size-related language. These findings suggest the existence of power representations within a generalized magnitude system, influenced by relative rather than absolute size. This research sheds light on how abstract concepts, such as power, are integrated into cognitive processes related to spatial perception.
权力认知反映了公民对社会等级制度和权力不平等的态度，而权力隐喻则反映了个人权力感的认知过程。本研究考察了权力表征对东亚参与者抓握孔径的影响。在实验1（n = 34）中，我们调查了与权力较小的词汇相比，权力较大的机构职位词汇是否会引发更大的抓握孔径，这表明权力与空间维度之间存在关联。我们的结果表明，权力较大的词汇确实会导致更大的抓握孔径，这表明权力与大小表征之间存在直接关联。在实验2（n = 20）中，结果表明，即使机构职位没有用与大小相关的语言描述，这种效应仍然存在。这些发现表明，在一个广义的量级系统中存在权力表征，它受相对大小而非绝对大小的影响。这项研究揭示了诸如权力等抽象概念是如何融入与空间感知相关的认知过程的。
