François Ric

Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion

Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brains modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demonstrations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them has been offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these findings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach.

Affect and Stereotypic Thinking: A Test of the Mood-and-General-Knowledge Model

Happy, sad, or neutral participants evaluated the likelihood of a suspect’s guilt. The suspect’s membership was or was not stereotypically associated with the misconduct of which he was accused. Participants also were provided with specific case information that varied in its implications (ambiguous implying either the suspect’s guilt or innocence). The results show that when stereotypes clearly contradict specific information, happy people rely on the latter and no longer use stereotypes. The general assumption of a greater reliance on stereotypes under happiness was found to be restricted to “slight inconsistency.” Overall, this study supports the mood-and-general-knowledge (MAGK) model. In contrast, even though sadness decreases reliance on stereotypes, it does not increase careful processing of incoming information, as is generally assumed in the literature.

Unconscious Addition: When We Unconsciously Initiate and Follow Arithmetic Rules.

This research shows that people can unconsciously initiate and follow arithmetic rules (e.g., addition). Participants were asked to detect whether a symbol was a digit. This symbol was preceded by 2 digits and a subliminal instruction: add or a control instruction. Participants were faster at identifying a symbol as a number when the symbol was equal to the sum of the 2 digits and they received the instruction to add the digits, suggesting that people can unconsciously solve arithmetic problems. Experiments 2 and 3 replicate these findings and demonstrate that the underlying processes can operate when the to-be-added digits are not perceived consciously. Thus, the unconscious can do (at least simple) arithmetic, such as addition.

Effects of the activation of affective information on stereotyping: when sadness increases stereotype use.

Two studies explored the impact of mere activation of affective information on the use of stereotypes in social judgment. These studies provided consistent results showing that the activation of information related to sadness increases reliance on stereotypes, whereas the activation of information related to happiness decreases it. These results were obtained in the absence of affective state changes among the participants and with the use of two different priming procedures (Study 1: scrambled sentences, Study 2: subliminal priming) and two different judgment tasks (Study 1: impression formation, Study 2: guilt judgment). Complementing the informational view of affective states, it is suggested that affective information of which people are not conscious activates behavioral tendencies of approach or of avoidance associated with the related emotion.

Number generation bias after action observation

Recent studies have demonstrated that conceptual and abstract knowledge could rely on and could be influenced by sensory-motor processing of usual goal-directed actions. In line with this, interactions have been reported between number magnitude and finger grip with, for example, small-magnitude numbers priming grip closure and large-magnitude numbers priming grip aperture. Here, we assessed whether observing a closing or opening grip was able to influence the magnitude of the numbers produced in a random number generation task, and we tested whether this effect was specific to biological hand actions by using non-biological fake hands with the same closure or aperture amplitude. The participants were asked to produce as randomly as possible numbers between 1 and 10 after they observed a change in posture (i.e. grip closing or grip opening) or in colour (i.e. red or blue hand). The results revealed that the participants produced more often small numbers than large ones after observing a grip closing, whereas they produced equally often small and large numbers after observing a grip opening or colour changes. Importantly, this effect was only present for the biological hands but not for the non-biological fake hands. This finding demonstrates that observing a biological grip closing conveys small-magnitude information, which, in turn, influences the mental selection of a numerical response. We discuss our results in the light of the internal random generator process proposed in the domain of numerical cognition and argue that number semantics is stored with a code governed by sensory-motor mechanisms.

Ageing-related stereotypes in memory: When the beliefs come true

Age-related stereotype concerns culturally shared beliefs about the inevitable decline of memory with age. In this study, stereotype priming and stereotype threat manipulations were used to explore the impact of age-related stereotype on metamemory beliefs and episodic memory performance. Ninety-two older participants who reported the same perceived memory functioning were divided into two groups: a threatened group and a non-threatened group (control). First, the threatened group was primed with an ageing stereotype questionnaire. Then, both groups were administered memory complaints and memory self-efficacy questionnaires to measure metamemory beliefs. Finally, both groups were administered the Logical Memory task to measure episodic memory, for the threatened group the instructions were manipulated to enhance the stereotype threat. Results indicated that the threatened individuals reported more memory complaints and less memory efficacy, and had lower scores than the control group on the logical memory task. A multiple mediation analysis revealed that the stereotype threat effect on the episodic memory performance was mediated by both memory complaints and memory self-efficacy. This study revealed that stereotype threat impacts belief in ones own memory functioning, which in turn impairs episodic memory performance.

Emotional norms for 524 French personality trait words

Newly measured rating norms provide a database of emotion-related dimensions for 524 French trait words. Measures include valence, approach/avoidance tendencies associated with the trait, possessor- and other-relevance of the trait, and discrete emotions conveyed by the trait (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). The normative data were obtained from 328 participants and were revealed to be stable across samples and gender. These data go beyond a dimensional structure and consider more fine-grained descriptions such as the categorical emotions, as well as the perspective of the evaluator conveyed by the traits. They should thus be particularly useful for researchers interested in emotion or in the emotional dimension of cognition, action, or personality. The database is available as supplementary material.

Quand « amour » amorce « soleil » (ou pourquoi l’amorcage affectif n’est pas un (simple) cas d’amorçage semantique ?)

L’article presente une analyse theorique des effets d’amorcage affectif. Cette analyse suggere qu’une explication en termes de propagation d’activation dans un reseau semantique se heurte a deux types de problemes: 1) des incoherences au niveau theorique; 2) des difficultes a rendre compte d’un certain nombre de donnees, meme lorsque que ces donnees sont obtenues avec la tâche de prononciation. Plusieurs explications alternatives sont proposees. Celles-ci reposent sur l’hypothese de l’existence d’un systeme affectif independant du systeme semantique, et/ ou sur l’operation de processus autres que la propagation d’activation, tels que la competition de reponses motrices ou la selection de la reponse (attention selective). Il est finalement avance que ces explications alternatives, bien que distinctes, ne sont pas incompatibles et peuvent etre integrees pour rendre compte des effets d’amorcage affectif d’une maniere plus complete.