[Emotion and incarnated cognition: the driving dimension of the verbal answers "yes" and "no"].
Thibaut Brouillet, Loïc Heurley, Sophie Martin, Denis Brouillet
Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale June 2010 DOI: 10.1037/a0019732 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Experimental study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key findings | The authors report that automatic evaluation of word valence was linked to "pull" and "push" motor responses and to the verbal responses "yes" and "no," and that the verbal responses interacted with the motor responses. They argue this interaction supports the embodied cognition claim that positive and negative verbal responses have a motor component. |
Abstract
Theories of embodied cognition make the hypothesis that all cognitive operations, including high-level ones, are fundamentally rooted in the current state of the body and in the sensory-motor systems of the brain. Related experimental work has been concerned solely with the link between automatic cognitive processes and motor responses. This link has never been supposed to result from the production of verbal responses, such as the responses "yes" and "no." However, a great many tasks require a verbal response along with a motor response. In this study, we have demonstrated that cognitive and automatic evaluation of the valence of words involves a close link with the motor responses of "pull" and "push", as well as the verbal responses "yes" and "no" when the task requires answering "yes" or "no" whether there is the letter "a" in a word. Moreover, the results obtained show that the verbal responses "yes" and "no" interact with the motor responses of "pull" and "push". This interaction supports the idea that positive and negative verbal responses present a motor component, as contemplated in embodied cognition theories (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Scorolli & Borghi, 2007; Barsalou, 2008).