Action Contribution to Competence Judgments: The Use of the Journey Schema

Abstract

The current research considered the question of how performing an action, or merely preparing the body for action, can have an impact on social judgments related to person perception. Participants were asked to ascribe competence and warmth characteristics to a target person by reading a metaphoric text while their body was manipulated to be prepared for the processing of action-congruent information. In Experiment 1, participants whose forward body action matched the metaphoric action described in the text ascribed more competence characteristics to a politician than did control participants. In Experiment 2, participants whose body was merely prepared for forward movement also ascribed more competence characteristics to a politician than did control participants. In addition, the data from Experiment 2 ruled out an alternative non-embodied explanation (i.e., that effect is due to basic associative processes) grounded in the existing literatures on attitudes by demonstrating that body manipulation had no effect on competence when a non-metaphoric text was used. Finally, no evidence was found that body manipulation affects warmth judgments. These studies converge in demonstrating that forward body movements enhance the favorability of competence judgments when these match the metaphoric forward movements described by text.

Explicit (Not Implicit) Attitudes Mediate the Focus of Attention During Sentence Processing

“…The findings reported in this article add to the empirical evidence that comprehenders track various dimensions of situation models during language comprehension (e.g., Gernsbacher et al, 1992;Zwaan et al, 1995a,b;de Vega, 1996;Rinck and Bower, 2000;Therriault et al, 2006;Kang et al, 2019); and that the comprehenders' situational models capture information about a character's emotional and actions states (e.g., de Vega, 1996;Borghi, 2004;Horchak et al, 2016;Horchak and Garrido, 2020a). Whereas most previous studies focused their efforts on understanding how multiple dimensions of the situation model (e.g., protagonists, intentionality, causation, etc.)…”

Dropping bowling balls on tomatoes: Representations of object state-changes during sentence processing.

“…A limitation of the current study is that it does not allow us to make strong inferences as to the types of processes that underlie the activation of representational content. On the one hand, there is a wealth of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence that modality-specific systems are implicated in the representation of conceptual knowledge (Binder & Desai, 2011; Edmiston & Lupyan, 2017; Glenberg et al, 2008; Hauk, Johnsrude, & Pulvermüller, 2004; Horchak et al, 2014; Horchak, Giger, & Garrido, 2016; Horchak, Giger, & Pochwatko, 2014; Ostarek & Huettig, 2017). On the other hand, there appears to be no direct experimental support for simulation-based accounts in the sentence-picture verification task at this point.…”

The “ins” and “outs” of person perception: The influence of consonant wanderings in judgments of warmth and competence

“…To the best of our knowledge, the grounding of competence in the physical world has not yet been well-established. However, recent studies have shown the relationship between forward body movements and approach-oriented posture in competence judgments (Horchak, Giger, & Garrido, 2016).…”