The body language: The spontaneous influence of congruent bodily arousal on the awareness of emotional words.

Abstract

Nowadays, the idea of a reciprocal influence of physiological and psychological processes seems to be widely accepted. For instance, current theories of embodied emotion suggest that knowledge about an emotion concept involves simulations of bodily experienced emotional states relevant to the concept. In line with this framework, the present study investigated whether actual levels of physiological arousal interact with the processing of emotional words. Participants performed 2 blocks of an attentional blink task, once after a cycling session (increased arousal) and once after a relaxation session (reduced arousal). Concretely, participants were instructed to detect and report 2 target words (T1 and T2) presented among a series of nonword distractors. T1 and T2 were either neutral, high arousal, or low arousal words. Results revealed that increased physiological arousal led to improved reports of high arousal T2 words, whereas reduced physiological arousal led to improved reports of low arousal T2 words. Neutral T2 remained unaffected by the arousing conditions. These findings emphasize that actual levels of physiological arousal modulate the cognitive access to arousal (in-)congruent emotional concepts and suggest a direct grounding of emotion knowledge in our bodily systems of arousal.

Increased heart rate after exercise facilitates the processing of fearful but not disgusted faces

“…This coherent pattern of results indicates that the facilitating effect of high heart rate depends on its congruency with the emotion of fear, not on more generic factors (e.g., a generic emotional or arousal state that may facilitate the recognition of all emotional stimuli, or speed up overall response time independent of the stimuli). This study thus replicates and extends previous findings that facial expressions and body arousal can influence the recognition of emotionally charged stimuli 28 , 59 – 64 , highlighting the importance of congruent bodily states. A further indication of that the Exercise condition did not produce a generic facilitatory effect comes from the fact that participants in this condition were generally slower (not faster) in recognizing disgusted and neutral faces.…”

“…In keeping with the view that emotional processing is an embodied process, we hypothesize that participants with (experimentally manipulated) increased heart rate are facilitated in processing faces expressing congruent physiological/emotional state (in our study, fear, which is physiologically associated with high heart rate). Comparing one emotion that is strongly associated with high heart rate (fear) and one emotion that is weakly or not associated with it (disgust) will permit us to assess whether a facilitatory effect is specific to a body state (and its associated interoceptive signals) or is due to a more generic process that results from physical activity such as arousal - intended here as a generic state of physical/mental alertness and readiness to move or to process stimuli, which is not univocally associated to a particular emotion 28 .…”

Evidence of Rapid Modulation by Social Information of Subjective, Physiological, and Neural Responses to Emotional Expressions

“…This suggests that embodiment circuitries may act as a boost for subsequent cognitive or emotional processes when the situation is socially relevant for the individual, but irrespective of its specific content (either negative or positive social situations). This supports and extends previous articles suggesting a predominant role of arousal (compared to valence) during embodiment of emotional cues (Beffara et al, 2012 , 2016 ; Kever et al, 2015 ).…”

Right wing authoritarianism is associated with race bias in face detection

“…Racial biases have been robustly reported in face detection but the effects may depend on context, culture and task [5]. The dependency of racial bias upon these factors is not surprising given that high-level conceptual or social information are known to modulate low-level mechanisms of visual perception [6,7,8]. Affective valence modulates object identification during visual perception [9]but personality traits, ideologies, motivation, and social context also play a large part in face processing and categorization [10,11,12,13].…”