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Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion

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Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and EmotionPaula M. NiedenthalLaboratory in Social and Cognitive PsychologyCNRS and University of Clermont-Ferrand, FranceLawrence W. BarsalouDepartment of PsychologyEmory UniversityPiotr WinkielmanDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of California, San DiegoSilvia Krauth-Gruber and François RicLaboratory in Social PsychologyUniversité René Descartes, ParisFindings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, andemotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, whereembodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in thebrain’s modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We showthat embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver inter-acts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver representssocial objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demon-strations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them hasbeen offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the PerceptualSymbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these find-ings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare thePSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticismsthat have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach.Consider the following findings. Wells and Petty(1980) reported that nodding the head (as in agree-ment) while listening to persuasive messages led tomore positive attitudes toward the message contentthan shaking the head (as in disagreement). Caciop-po, Priester, and Berntson (1993) observed that novelChinese ideographs presented during arm flexion (anaction associated with approach) were subsequentlyevaluated more favorably than ideographs presentedduring arm extension (an action associated with avoid-ance). Duclos et al. (1989) led participants to adoptvarious bodily positions associated nonobviously withfear, anger, and sadness and found that these posturalstates modulated experienced affect. Strack, Martin,and Stepper (1988) unobtrusively facilitated or inhib-ited the contraction of the zygomaticus (smiling) mus-cle by asking participants to hold a pen in their mouthwhile they evaluated cartoons. Participants judged car-toons to be funnier when smiling was facilitated ratherthan inhibited (see Stepper & Strack, 1993, for relatedfindings). Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) showedthat participants in whom the elderly stereotype hadbeen primed subsequently walked down a hallwaymore slowly than did participants in whom the stereo-type had not been primed. And Schubert (2004) showedthat making a fist influenced men’s and women’s auto-matic processing of words related to the concept ofpower.All such findings suggest that the body is closelytied to the processing of social and emotional informa-tion. No single theory, however, has integrated thefindings or explained them in a unified manner. Recenttheories of embodied cognition, which view knowl-Personality and Social Psychology Review2005, Vol. 9, No. 3, 184–211Copyright © 2005 byLawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.184The authors thank Vic Ferreira, Art Glenberg, Danny McIntosh,Randy O’Reilly, and Cathy Reed for their helpful comments on vari-ous drafts of this article. We also thank the Society for Personalityand Social Psychology for awarding this article the SPSP 2003 The-oretical Innovation Prize. Preparation of this article was supportedby National Science Foundation grants BCS-0217294 to Piotr Winkiel-man and BCS-0350687 to Piotr Winkielman and Paula Niedenthal.Requests for reprints should be sent to Paula M. Nieden-thal, LAPSCO, Université Blaise Pascal, 34, avenue Carnot, 63037Clermont-Ferrand Cedex, FRANCE. E-mail: [email protected] or to Piotr Winkielman, e-mail: [email protected] acquisition and knowledge use as processesgrounded in the brain’s modality-specific systems,hold promise of accounting for such findings and, per-haps most important, predicting the effects explicitlyand a priori (Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert,2003; Smith & Semin, 2004). Further, these recent the-ories are able to successfully address conceptual issuesthat doomed previous embodiment proposals, makingthem attractive alternatives to widely accepted amodaltheories of cognition. The aim of this article is to showhow that is so and to propose new ideas for the study ofinformation processing in social psychology.The Notion of Embodied MindThe nature of knowledge—the basic representa-tional elements of cognitive operations—lies at thecore of psychology and cognitive science. Our view ofwhat knowledge is determines how we conceptualizeperception, memory, judgment, reasoning, and evenemotion. It is generally agreed that the processing ofany mental content, including social and emotionalcontent, involves internal symbols of some sort—men-tal representations. But this really just begs the ques-tion. What are mental representations? Further, how dothey derive their meaning?—an issue known as thesymbol grounding problem (Harnad, 2003; Searle,1980). If we can make progress on these questions, wecan put psychology in general and social psychology inparticular on firmer theoretical footing.Amodal ArchitecturesMost models guiding current cognitive and socialpsychology are based on the traditional computer met-aphor. This popular metaphor makes two major claimsabout the mind. The first is that the software of themind is independent of the hardware of the body andthe brain (Block, 1995; Dennett, 1969). Thus, cogni-tive operations are arbitrarily related to their physicalinstantiations so that any sufficiently complex physicalsystem could have human intelligence. In principle,the software that constitutes the mind (including the“social mind”) could run on anything—neurons, sili-con, or even wooden gears—as long as the elementswere arranged in proper functional relations. The sec-ond claim of the computer metaphor is that high-levelcognition, such as inference, categorization, and mem-ory, is performed using abstract, amodal symbols thatbear arbitrary relations to the perceptual states that pro-duce them (Newell & Simon, 1972; Pylyshyn, 1984).Mental operations on these amodal representations areperformed by a central processing unit that is informa-tionally


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