Abstract
Body postures not only have functions of emotional expression and signal transmission, but also have an impact on emotions, cognition and behavior. Appling the dual task paradigm to investigate the influence of postures on cognitive tasks is the focus of posture effect research, which can help people to improve learning and work efficiency. The embodied cognition theory believes that a specific posture can directly produce embodied effect, and promote the task processing which has the same attributes with the posture.
The dual-task paradigm of "posture-conceptual processing" was used to explore the effects of upright and slumped postures on emotional conceptual processing. The upright posture with the positive emotional association and the slumped posture with the negative emotional association were chosed as posture variables, meanwhile, we adopted two kinds of emotional conceptual processing tasks (“judge the valence of emotional words” and “assess the valence of emotional words”) which are diverse in processing degree in two experiments separately. There were 134 participants who are college students took part in the research including 67 participants in experiment 1 and 66 participants in experiment 2. In two experiments, the mixed design of posture (upright, slumped) and conceptual valence (positive, negative) were utilized.
The results of experiment 1 showed that when performing the valence judgment task of emotional words with a low degree of cognitive processing, there is no significant difference between the two postures, neither in judging positive words nor in judging negative words; In experiment 2, the scores of assessing negative words in slumped posture were significantly lower than that in upright posture, and there was no significant difference between postures in scores of assessing positive words. We can conclude that the slumped posture can produce embodied effect and the effect is affected by the degree of cognitive processing in emotional concept processing. The deeper the processing, the more the embodied connection can be stimulated. The embodied effect of upright posture was not clear in this study, because the effect of the upright posture displayed in experiment 1 maybe was just because of the processing bias of positive words. however, We can't deny the existence of the embodied effect of upright posture, because it is affected by many factors which result in the effect can't appear in the experimental tasks. In the emotional self-assessment of the two experiments, it was not found that the two postures induced explicit receptive differences.
According to the two experiments, it was demonstrated that postures can affect the processing of emotional concepts, however, the effect was not directly and fixedly which was affected by many factors. When and how posture effect comes into being, and its application in localized situations need to be further discussed.
Key words
posture /
dual-task /
emotional conceptual processing /
embodiment
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Effects of Upright and Slumped Postures on Emotional Conceptual Processing[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(3): 523-529
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