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Lectures 11 & 12:
Embodiment and Social Cognition
Barsalou, L.W. (2008). Grounded Cognition. Annual Review
of Psychology, 59, 617-645.
Niedenthal, P.M. et al. (2005). Embodiment in Attitudes,
Social Perception, and Emotion. Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 9, 184-211.
A Thought Experiment!
• A man goes into a bar to tell a joke. Two people are in
the bar, one is smiling and one is frowning. Who is
more likely to get the punch line and appreciate the
joke?
Mr. Smile or Mr Frown?
Experimental Observations:
Posture
•
While adopting either a conventional working posture or one
of two so-called ergonomic postures, in which the back was
straight and the shoulders were held high and back or in
which the shoulders and head were slumped, experimental
participants learned that they had succeeded on an
achievement test completed earlier. Those who received the
god news in the slumped posture felt less proud and reported
being in a worse mood than participants in the upright or
working posture.
Stepper & Strack (1993)
Experimental Observations:
Valence
• Images that typically evoke emotionally positive and
negative responses were presented on a computer
screen. Experimental participants were asked to indicate
when a picture appeared by quickly moving a lever.
Some participants were instructed to push a lever away
from their body, whereas others were instructed to pull
a lever toward their body. Participants who pushed the
lever away responded to negative images faster than to
positive images, whereas participants who pulled the
lever toward themselves responded faster to positive
images.
Duckworth et al. (2002)
Experimental Observations:
Decent Pen?
•
Under the guise of studying the quality of different
headphones, participants were induced either to nod in
agreement or to shake their heads in disagreement. While they
were “testing” their headphones with one of these two
movements, the experimenter placed a pen on the table in
front of them. Later, a different experimenter offered the
participants the pen that had been placed on the table earlier
or a novel pen. Individuals who were nodding their heads
preferred the old pen, whereas participants who had been
shaking their heads preferred the new one.
Tom et al. (1991)
Experimental Observations:
Do You Agree?
• Nodding the head (as in agreement) while listening to
persuasive messages leads to more positive attitudes
toward the message content than shaking the head (as i
disagreement).
Well and Petty (1980)
Experimental Observations:
Is That Nice?
• Novel Chinese idiograms presented during arm flexion
(a action associated with approach) were subsequently
evaluated more favourably than idiograms presented
during arm extension (an action associated with
avoidance).
Cacioppo et al. (1993)
A Wee Digression:
The Mind-Body Problem
• Dualism
body - works like a machine (obeys laws of physics)
mind - non-material (functions mysteriously)
Problem - how can the mind influence the body (and
vice versa)?
as it turns out, very easily!
Knowledge Representation:
How is Information Stored in the Brain?
• What is the nature of knowledge?
it is generally agreed that the processing of any mental
content, including social information, involves internal
symbols of sort (i.e., mental representations - symbolic
processing).
But what are these representations?
How do representations derive their meaning (i.e.,
symbol grounding problem - Harnard, 2003)?
Amodal vs. Modal Architectures
Amodal Architectures
• Mind as computer metaphor
hardware vs. software (Block, 1995)
body vs. mind (independent)
• high-level cognitive operations (inference,
categorization, memory) is performed using abstract,
amodal symbols that bear arbitrary relations to the
perceptual states that produce them (Newell & Simon,
1972)
An Amodal Dog
• Sensory-Motor Information (modality-specific systems)
what do dogs look like?
what sounds do dogs make?
how do dogs smell?
how do dogs move?
etc
• multi-sensory information transformed into amodal
symbolic representation
• mental operations (e.g., thinking) are then undertaken
on these amodal (e.g., language) representations
An Amodal Person:
Knowledge Accumulation
• When interacting with a person, amodal symbols
redescribe the experienced perceptions, actions, and
introspections to establish a conceptual representation
of the interaction in long-term memory.
• As our knowledge of such interactions grows, the
underlying amodal systems become organized into
structures that represents concepts (e.g., schemas)
extracted from experience.
• Amodal redescriptions of social experience constitute
social knowledge.
Amodal Architectures:
Some Problems
• What exactly is the redescription process that produces
amodal symbols from modality-specific (e.g.,
perception, action) states?
no evidence exists for such a process in the brain
• There is no compelling evidence that the brain contains
amodal symbols.
• The amodal symbol account is at odds with the
available empirical evidence.
Embodied Architectures
• Researchers have recently adopted the notion that
knowledge is embodied or grounded in bodily states
and in the brain’s modality-specific systems (Barsalou,
1999).
• The basic idea underlying theories of embodied
cognition is that cognitive representations and
operations are grounded in their physical context.
Rather than relying on amodal abstractions that exist
independently of their physical instantiation, cognition
relies on the brain’s modality-specific and on actual
bodily states.
• Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS - Barsalou, 1999)
Perceptual Symbol Systems:
Barsalou (1999)
•
modality-specific states that represent perception, action and
introspection in on-line situations are also used to represent
these situations in the off-line processing that underlies
memory, language and thought.
•
rather than using amodal redescriptions of on-line modalityspecific states to represent situations, the cognitive system
uses reenactments (simulations) of them instead.
•
the key notion of PSS is that simulations of perceptual, motor,
and introspective experience underlie the representation and
processing of knowledge.
•
reenactment (simulation) of processing operations in
modality-specific systems (i.e., think about a dog).
Evidence for Embodied Social Cognition
• Attitudes
• Social Perception
• Emotion
Embodiment of Attitudes
• Darwin (1904) defined an attitude as a
collection of motor behaviours especially posture - that convey an
organisms response toward an object.
• body involved in attitudinal processing
(On-Line) Embodiment of Attitudes
• Participants instructed to nod or shake their
heads while wearing headphones, under the
pretext that the research was designed to
investigate whether the headphones slipped off
while the listeners moved to music.
While nodding or shaking, participants heard
either an agreeable or disagreeable message
about a university-related topic. Later they rated
how much they agreed with the message.
Movements modulated judgments (nod = agree
with message, shake = disagree with message).
Wells & Petty (1980)
(Off-Line) Embodiment of Attitudes
• Participants generated the names of famous
people and later classified the people according
to whether they liked, disliked, or were neutral
about them. During the name generation task,
participants either pulled up on the table in front
of them from underneath its bottom surface (an
approach behaviour) or pushed down on its top
surface (an avoidance behaviour).
Participants who performed the approach
behaviour during name generation retrieved
more names of people they liked, whereas those
who performed the avoidance action retrieved
more names of people they disliked.
Forster & Strack (1997, 1998)
(On-Line) Embodiment of Social Perception
• Neonates imitate basic facial gestures such as
tongue protrusion and mouth opening.
Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1989)
• synchrony, behavioural cordination
speech rate
accent
syntax
walking speed
• Facilitates rapport and harmony (LaFrance,
1985)
(Off-Line) Embodiment of Social Perception
• Embodiment of social perception when targets
are not present. Category priming (e.g., grey,
Florida, bingo) and subsequent walking speed.
Participants walked more slowly when primed
with elderly stereotype.
Bargh et al. (1996)
(Off-Line) Embodiment of Social Perception
• Participants formed impressions of people with
whom they might later work on a problemsolving task. Some of these people were
competent while others were incompetent.
Facial EMG was measured.
Participants were more likely to display positive
facial reactions when their imagined partners
were competent rather than incompetent.
Vanman et al. (1997)
Embodiment of Social Perception:
Recent Findings
• Prior to an impression-formation task,
participants were required to hold (during a brief
elevator journey) a cup of hot or iced coffee.
Afterwards, they gave their impressions of a
stranger.
• Participants considered the target to have more
favourable traits (e.g., generous, caring) when
they previously held the hot rather than cold
cup.
Williams and Bargh (2008)
A Soothing Hand
That Stinks!
• Participants were required odors that generated
feelings of disgust. The same participants then
watched videos of other individuals expressing
disgust. Results showed that areas of the anterior
insula were activated both when individuals observed
disgust in others and when they experienced disgust
themselves.
Wicker et al. (2003)
(On-Line) Embodiment of Emotion
• Researchers told participants that they were studying
adaptations for people who had lost the use of their
hands. Such individuals would need to use their
mouths to hold pencils for writing, or to use a
television remote. The study was to assess whether the
unpleasantness or difficulty of these tasks affected
people’s responsiveness." The current study on people
with full use of their hands was simply designed to
test the procedure.The participants then held a pencil
in their teeth (which naturally activates the muscles
typically used for smiling) or lips (which does not
activate those muscles) and then rated several cartoons
for funniness. Those who were (unknowingly)
"smiling" rated the cartoons as funnier than people
who were not smiling.
Strack et al. (1988)
Neural Simulation:
Perceiving vs. Imagining
Emotion Recognition
• Recognizing a facial expression of emotion in another
person and experiencing that emotion oneself involve
overlapping neural structures.
• Mirroring
That Stinks!
• Participants were required odors that generated
feelings of disgust. The same participants then
watched videos of other individuals expressing
disgust. Results showed that areas of the anterior
insula were activated both when individuals observed
disgust in others and when they experienced disgust
themselves.
Wicker et al. (2003)
Mirroring and Observational Learning
• An important consequence of emotional resonance is
that one can learn from the experience of others.
Imaging research has revealed similar changes in brain
activity (ACC) of a female participant when painful
stimulation was applied to her own hand and to her
partner’s hand.
• This suggests that observational learning may be
supported by a reenactment of the emotional
experience of the model in the observer.
Singer et al. (2004)
Things Worth Knowing
1.
What is embodiment?
2.
How and when do bodily states impact cognition?