Effects of Emotional Valence and Concreteness on Children's Recognition Memory

Valence and concreteness in item recognition: Evidence against the affective embodiment account

The Affective Embodiment Account posits that sensorimotor interactions play an important role in learning and processing concrete words whereas experiences from emotional states play an important role in learning and processing abstract words. Because of this, there should be greater enhancement of valence for abstract than for concrete words and therefore there should be an interaction between valence and concreteness. Although this prediction has been observed in a number of tasks, very few studies have looked specifically at memory. Three experiments are reported that assess whether valence interacts with concreteness in recognition. In Experiment 1, recognition of concrete words was better than abstract, but there was no difference as a function of whether the words were positive or negative and there was no interaction. Experiment 2 compared positive and neutral words and Experiment 3 compared negative and neutral words; in both, there was a concreteness effect but no effect of valence and no interaction. These results replicate previous findings that when positive and negative words are equated more fully, valence has no effect on recognition, and also suggest a limit on the scope of the Affective Embodiment Account.

The role of emotion in acquisition of verb meaning

Children's earliest acquired words are often learned through sensorimotor experience, but it is less clear how children learn the meaning of concepts whose referents are less associated with sensorimotor experience. The Affective Embodiment Account postulates that children use emotional experience to learn more abstract word meanings. There is mixed evidence for this account; analyses using mega-study datasets suggest that negative or positively valenced abstract words are learned earlier than emotionally neutral abstract words, yet the relationship between sensorimotor experience and valence is inconsistent across different methods of operationalising sensorimotor experience. In the present study, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account specifically in the context of verb acquisition. We tested two semantic dimensions of sensorimotor experience: concreteness and embodiment ratings. Our analyses showed that more positive and negative abstract verbs are acquired at an earlier age than neutral abstract verbs, consistent with the Affective Embodiment Account. When sensorimotor experience is operationalised as embodiment, high embodiment verbs are acquired at an earlier age than low embodiment verbs, and there is further benefit for high embodiment and positively valenced verbs. The findings further clarify the role of Affective Embodiment as a mechanism of language acquisition.

The Attachment Mapping Protocol (AMP): An Assessment and Treatment Tool for General Psychotherapy, Systemic Family Therapy and Multifaith Spiritual Care

This paper introduces the Attachment Mapping Protocol (AMP), which is an assessment and treatment tool for use in individual psychotherapy, systemic family therapy and multifaith spiritual care, using a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of care. Attachment theory has a long and significant history in psychology, with an evolving relationship within the above clinical domains. A central aim of this paper will be to recognize and affirm the extension of attachment theory beyond the traditional parameters of nascent parental, guardianship bonds and individual, developmental psychology, to reveal a much broader spectrum of valid attachment considerations for mental health and spiritual well-being. A case study will be applied to the interviewing instrument to demonstrate its utility for broadening assessment beyond attachment figures to include surrogate attachments of other persons, places and things. A model of spiritual discernment derived from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola will undergird this larger worldview of attachment considerations.

Role of Affective Factors and Concreteness on the Processing of Idioms

In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact idiom processing. Participants read short idiomatic phrases (e.g., he kicked the bucket), word-by-word and for comprehension while their reaction time was recorded. The results showed that the emotional status of idioms contribute to their processing and this contribution is modulated by familiarity and decomposability levels of idioms in different ways. In particular, the impact of valence (i.e., the degree an idiom is pleasant/unpleasant) was modulated by familiarity, and the impact of arousal was modulated by decomposability. We did not find strong evidence for the contribution of concreteness for idiom processing. Our findings are aligned with theories of semantic representation, which suggest that besides linguistic information, sensory-motor and affective information are fundamental in representing meaning.

Children's suggestibility for neutral arbitrary actions in the context of norm violations

This study investigated children's false memories for neutral arbitrary actions. Five- to six-year-olds (N = 32) were taught four arbitrary actions, each following specific rules. The children then watched a televised adult performing eight actions: the four familiar actions while violating one aspect of each rule script and four unfamiliar actions. Suggestive and non-suggestive questions about all witnessed actions were asked, followed by forced-choice test questions to measure the false memory effect. The likelihood of forming false memories was higher in the suggestive condition than in the non-suggestive condition. There was no effect of previously acquired knowledge about the rules of the actions and no interaction between rule knowledge and suggestion. The results are discussed in light of previous findings in related fields of false memory research.

Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment

How are abstract concepts such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' represented in the mind? One prominent proposal suggests that abstract concepts are grounded in emotion. Supporting this 'affective embodiment' account, abstract concepts are rated to be more strongly positive or more strongly negative than concrete concepts. This paper demonstrates that this finding generalizes across languages by synthesizing rating data from Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish and Spanish. However, a deeper look at the same data suggests that the idea of emotional grounding only characterizes a small subset of abstract concepts. Moreover, when the concreteness/abstractness dimension is not operationalized using concreteness ratings, it is actually found that concrete concepts are rated as more emotional than abstract ones. Altogether, these results suggest limitations to the idea that emotion is an important factor in the grounding of abstract concepts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Editorial concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences

This theme issue aims to view the literature on concepts through a novel lens, that of social interaction and its influence on inner experiences. It discusses unsolved problems in literature on concepts, emphasizing the distinction between concrete versus abstract concepts and external versus internal grounding. This introductory article reflects the two research streams that the theme aims to bridge-in this area, the dimension of embodied interaction with others and how this influences the interaction with ourselves is still underexplored. In the first part, we discuss recent trends in social cognition, showing how interacting with others influences our concepts. In the second part, we address how social interactions become part of our inner world in a Vygotskian fashion. First, we illustrate how interoception, emotion and metacognition are connected with concepts and knowledge. Second, we deal with how language, in both its outer and inner form, can empower cognition and concepts. We also briefly describe how novel experimental and computational methods contribute to investigating the online use of concepts. Overall, this introductory article outlines the potentialities of an integrated and interactive approach that can give new, fresh life to a topic, that of concepts, which lies at the root of human cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Quantifying children's sensorimotor experience: Child body-object interaction ratings for 3359 English words

Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings measure how easily the human body can physically interact with a word's referent. Previous research has found that words higher in BOI tend to be processed more quickly and accurately in tasks such as lexical decision, semantic decision, and syntactic classification, suggesting that sensorimotor information is an important aspect of lexical knowledge. However, limited research has examined the importance of sensorimotor information from a developmental perspective. One barrier to addressing such theoretical questions has been a lack of semantic dimension ratings that take into account child sensorimotor experience. The goal of the current study was to collect Child BOI rating norms. Parents of children aged 5 to 9 years old were asked to rate words according to how easily an average 6-year-old child can interact with each word's referent. The relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with other lexical semantic dimensions were assessed, as well as the relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with age of acquisition. Child BOI ratings were more strongly related to valence and sensory experience ratings than Adult BOI ratings and were a better predictor of three different measures of age of acquisition. The results suggest that child-centric ratings such as those reported here provide a more sensitive measure of children's experience that can be used to address theoretical questions in embodied cognition from a developmental perspective.

Development of Abstract Word Knowledge

The development of children's word knowledge is an important testing ground for the embodied account of word meaning, which proposes that word meanings are grounded in sensorimotor systems. Acquisition of abstract words, in particular, is a noted challenge for strong accounts of embodiment. We examined acquisition of abstract word meanings, using data on development of vocabulary knowledge from early school to University ages. We tested two specific proposals for how abstract words are learned: the affective embodiment account, that emotional experience is key to learning abstract word meanings, and the learning through language proposal, that abstract words are acquired through language experience. We found support for the affective embodiment account: word valence, interoception, and mouth action all facilitated abstract word acquisition more than concrete word acquisition. We tested the learning through language proposal by investigating whether words that appear in more diverse linguistic contexts are earlier acquired. Results showed that contextual diversity facilitated vocabulary acquisition, but did so for both abstract and concrete words. Our results provide evidence that emotion and sensorimotor systems are important to children's acquisition of abstract words, but there is still considerable variance to be accounted for by other factors. We offer suggestions for future research to examine the acquisition of abstract vocabulary.