Emotional Valence and Body Representation: An Experiment on Embodied Cognition

In line with Lakoff’s theory of embodied cognition, several studies in the field of emotional processing have demonstrated that positive and negative valence is represented based on spatial and bodily characteristics.

The present study aimed to investigate the implicit link between body parts and the emotional valence of Persian words.

The participants included 33 right-handed undergraduate students in the field of psychology who were selected via the convenience sampling method. A priming task with emotional negative and positive words (prime) was used, and the participants had to recognize the leftness or rightness of hand stimuli (target). Reaction times were recorded for target stimuli. The data were analyzed in SPSS software (version 24) using repeated-measures ANOVA.

The obtained results pointed to the implicit association of positive and negative words with bodily features (right hand and left hand).

The findings of the current study are finally discussed within theories of embodied cognition, as well as hemispheric and language processing, for emotional stimuli.