The body language: The spontaneous influence of congruent bodily arousal on the awareness of emotional words.
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.
Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain.
Anne
A
Kever
Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain.
Delphine
D
Grynberg
Université Catholique de Louvain.
Coralie
C
Eeckhout
Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, University Grenoble Alpes.
Martial
0000-0003-4367-7049
M
Mermillod
Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Carole
C
Fantini
Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain.
Nicolas
0000-0001-8966-6148
N
Vermeulen
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D054518:Attentional Blink / Q000502:physiology; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007697:Kinesics; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult