Is Emotional Magnitude Spatialized? A Further Investigation.

Is Emotional Magnitude Spatialized? A Further Investigation.
Cogn Sci. 2019 Apr;43(4):e12727
Authors: Holmes KJ, Alcat C, Lourenco SF
Abstract
Accumulating evidence suggests that different magnitudes (e.g., number, size, and duration) are spatialized in the mind according to a common left-right metric, consistent with a generalized system for representing magnitude. A previous study conducted by two of us (Holmes & Lourenco, ) provided evidence that this metric extends to the processing of emotional magnitude, or the intensity of emotion expressed in faces. Recently, however, Pitt and Casasanto () showed that the earlier effects may have been driven by a left-right mapping of mouth size rather than emotional magnitude, and they found no evidence for an emotional magnitude mapping when using words as stimuli. Here, we report two new experiments that further examine these conclusions. In Experiment 1, using face stimuli with mouths occluded, we replicate the original finding: Less emotional faces were associated with the left and more emotional faces with the right. However, we also find that people can reliably infer the sizes of the occluded mouths, and that these inferred mouth sizes can explain the observed left-right mapping. In Experiment 2, we show that comparative judgments of emotional words yield a left-right mapping of emotional magnitude not attributable to stimulus confounds. Based on these findings, we concur with Pit...

Source: Cognitive Science - March 31, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Holmes KJ, Alcat C, Lourenco SF Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research