宗教对信徒颜色认知的影响及作用机制:以中国台湾宗教信徒为例

The Effect and the Mechanism Religions Play on Color Cognition of Taiwan Religious Disciples

采用自然分类法考察中国台湾佛教徒、道教徒、基督徒和非宗教信徒的基本颜色词分类,并做多维标度和聚类分析,以揭示宗教对信徒颜色认知的影响。结果发现,中国台湾三大宗教信徒对基本颜色词的分类既具有共性,又存在差异,宗教信徒与非宗教信徒的基本颜色词分类也存在着共性和差异,共性反映了汉语言和汉文化的影响,差异反映了宗教对颜色认知的影响。研究表明,颜色通过意象式传播方式影响信徒的颜色认知,支持颜色词与颜色认知的相互作用理论。

The relation between color terms and color cognition is a basic issue in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics as it reflects therelationship between language and cognition. So far, this issue has been discussed by three distinct theories The Theory of Color Term Evolution, theLinguistic Relativity Hypothesis and the compromised view between the two theories named the Interaction Theory of Color and Color Cognition.This theory assumes that six factors （physics, physiology, cognition, intelligence, culture and language） can be organized at three different levels in thewhole theory system. All six factors interact with each other and finally form the color cognition together. In the present study, the Interaction Theory isexamined. Taiwan is exemplary for its religious diversity, where Buddhism, Christianity, and Taoism are the three most predominant religions sharingAsian culture and Chinese language. 211 Buddhism, 212 Christians, 210 Taoists and 202 persons without any faith from Taiwan participated in this research. Eleven Chinese basiccolor terms （blaek, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, gray and pink） were used as the experimental materials. The partici-pantswere asked to classify the eleven color terms according to their own criteria and then explain the reason why they sorted the color terms the way theydid. The responses were analyzed using the multidimensional scaling method. The results show that Buddhists, Christians, Taoists and non-religionists in Taiwan are con-sistent in their classification of basic color terms ingeneral. There are two dimensions in concep-tual structure and the average number of classification categories is four. However, the two dimen-sionsand the four sub-categories are varied. For Buddhists, the sub-categories are religious color, brown, cool color and neutral color, while for Taoists,these are warm color, religious color, brown and neural color. For Christians, the sub- categories are religious color, brown, cool color and warm color.Furthermore, they all share the dimension ＂religious / unreligious color＂, and the oth-er one is ＂cool / warm color＂, ＂colorful / neutral＂ and ＂cool/ warm color＂ for Buddhists, Taoists and Christians respectively. In order to probe into the relationship of the three religions, the Spearman gradecorrelation is used, and the eorrelation is both significant in two dimensions re-spectively. Mostly, the number of colors in each category is differentamong the three religions. The conclusion is that although differences resulted from religious cultures do exist in terms of the number and content of the categories, theyshare consistency in dimensions. The consis-tency and differences reflect the co-effects of the Asian culture and the sub-culture of religions on colorcognition. On the other hand, color as a symbol affects the cognition of religious disciples by imagistic transmission during which the religious cultureor conventions gradually affect the cognition of their disciples, especially the cognition of colors. To some extent, this makes the col-or cognitionsubconsciously influenced by the religious culture. In conclusion, these results sup-port the interaction theory of color and color cognition in thatpeople in the same culture and place share the same dimensions and eategnries of color.