Psychological review of geo-environmental factors in three Persian folk stories

Abstract

Cognitive narratology has been recognised as one of the most important ways of understanding human nature as expressed in the stories and narrations. In the present preliminary study, we aimed to use Turner and Fauconnier’s concepts of mental spaces and conceptual blending to explain the peculiarities of three stories belonging to three different cultural and geo-climate regions in Iran. In the present study, after collecting data from a set of texts, which included written, oral or visual, the content analysis method was used. We found some similarities among the mental spaces of different geographic regions in these three stories. They are, however, not solely influenced by environmental and cultural factors. The paper recommends that studies and investigations similar to the present one can be considered a basic but crucial step in demonstrating the extent to which a person's cognition and cognitive processing in general and the creation of meaning in particular are a continuation and representation of embodied experiences. Keywords: Cognitive, conceptual blending, geo-environmental, narratology, storytelling