War lessons or how social and personal back-ground shapes our perception

It is well-known that cognitive metaphor can reflect the process of conceptualization of the surrounding world in the human mind. The metaphorical transfer of the source domain's conceptual features to the target domain shows the essence of the reality perception in the consciousness. This study is focused on the intracultural variation of cognitive metaphors, particularly the phenomenon of the implicit-explicit dispersion in metaphors, dependence of their perception on the occupation, gender, and age of members of a culture, and type of metaphors. Based on conceptual metaphors, associated with the target domain WAR in the Russian culture, the researchers elaborate a novel approach to the analysis of conceptual metaphors, providing full-fledged scrutiny of the reflection of the surrounding realm in the minds of native speakers. The study involved 124 people, some of whom have direct professional experience in the military sphere. The obtained differences in the perception of simulated metaphorical models allow us to talk about intracultural variation of the WAR cognitive metaphor and the significant influence of personal experience on the perception of reality.