Abstract

Han (恨) is known as a cultural concept that contains the minds of Korean. Lee & Choi (2003) applied a multi-task method to college students of 1994 to identify the cultural representation of Han (恨). The result confirmed the possibility that Han (恨) could represent the cultural experience of Korean discourse beyond emotion. This study raised the need to verify the process of changing the cultural meaning of Han (恨) according to the times, and tried to compare the generational difference of Han (恨) representation by elaborating the method of previous studies. Experiment 1 observed the generational difference in the representation of Han (恨) with the free generation task and the rating task. The main result is that the generation frequency and rating strength of emotion words increased in the 2019 generation than in the 1994 generation, but the type of generated words and the rating scores ​​were significantly different. Experiment 2 showed that the naming time of the 1994 generation word was faster than the 2019 generation word, the cultural stimulus and the generational variable interacted with the task type, and the priming of the cultural variable was facilitated under the condition that the frequency and rating of the two generations coincide. The results were observed in the primed naming task. The two experiments showed that generations cause differences in the representation of cultural stimuli, and that the representation of Han (恨) was changed according to the generation. The 2019 generation represented Han (恨) more emotionally at the explicit level than the 1994 generation, but maintained the representation in which the meaning of the reference object and the cause of the event still persists at the implicit level. This study suggests that it is meaningful in that it confirmed the possibility of incremental and dynamic changes in the representation of the cultural Han (恨) concept using an elaborated experimental method.