Abstract
Embodiment approaches to cognition and emotion have put forth the idea that the way we think and talk about affective events often recruits spatial information that stems, to some extent, from our bodily experiences. For example, metaphorical expressions such as “being someone’s right hand” or “leaving something bad behind” convey affectivity associated with the lateral and sagittal dimensions of space. Action tendencies associated with affect such as the directional fluency of hand movements (dominant right hand-side – positive; non-dominant left hand-side – negative) and approach-avoidance behaviors (forward – positive; backwards – negative) might be mechanisms supporting such associations. Against this background, experimental research has investigated whether positive and negative words are freely allocated into space (e.g., close or far from one’s body) or resonate with congruent (vs. incongruent) predefined manual actions usually performed by joysticks or button presses (e.g., positive – right; negative – left, or vice versa). However, to date, it is unclear how the processing of affective concepts resonate with directional actions of the whole body, the more if such actions are performed freely within a context enabling both, lateral and sagittal movements. Accordingly, 67 right-handed participants were to freely step on an 8-response pad (front, back, right, left, front-right, front-left, back-right, or back-left) after being presented in front of them valence-laden personal life-events submitted before the task (e.g., words or sentences such as “graduation” or “birth of a child”). The most revealing finding of this study indicates that approach-avoidance behaviors and space-valence associations across laterality are interwoven during whole body step actions: Positive events induced steps highly biased to front-right whereas negative events induced steps highly biased to back-left.
Highlights
The term bodily resonance has been increasingly used within embodiment fields in psychology to underline that sensorimotor experiences play a pivotal role in the comprehension of complex phenomena such as emotions (e.g., Fuchs and Koch, 2014)
At the same time, the results suggest that approach-avoidance behaviors were not the only mechanism driving the results here
The high proportion of front-right steps when processing positive events is in line with a combination of space-valence associations based on approach-avoidance behaviors and the body specificity hypothesis
Summary
The term bodily resonance has been increasingly used within embodiment fields in psychology to underline that sensorimotor experiences play a pivotal role in the comprehension of complex phenomena such as emotions (e.g., Fuchs and Koch, 2014) In this regard, it has been suggested that, even at a representational level (e.g., language or thoughts), emotions are tightly bound to their embodied and situated component (e.g., bodily states or action tendencies; Niedenthal, 2007; Barsalou, 2008; Lachmair et al, 2016). “feeling high” or “feeling down” are expressions representing emotional concepts such as “joy” or “sadness” by binding them, in metaphorical terms, with the vertical dimension of space These metaphorical representations might partly rely on affective bodily states such as upward postures when feeling happy and slumped postures when feeling sad (e.g., Nair et al, 2015), which in turn, may prime associations between emotional valence and verticality (uppositive; down-negative; for an in-depth discussion see Borghi et al, 2017). Facilitation effects have been demonstrated for predefined actions by button-presses “up” or “down” when processing positive or negative words on a monitor as compared to the opposite mappings (up-negative and down-positive; Dudschig et al, 2015; Castaño et al, 2018)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
