The proposed experiments investigate the informational value of bodily cues in affective information processing. We suggest that in general, affective bodily cues (enacted affect) offer information with the same potential to guide cognitive processing as emotional feelings (felt affect) or activated cognitive concepts (conceptualized affect). Moreover, the influences of expressive cues should obey the same constraints as those that have been observed for feelings. For example, the feelings of mood are general and unconstrained and their influences on judgment and memory, when they occur, tend to be general rather than specific. But the nature of the influence should depend on the generality vs. specificity of the information conveyed by the experience of affective cues. Hence, while some of the proposed experiments examine relatively unconstrained expressive information, others examine cues specific to one emotion (fear), whose meaning is further constrained by the active mental context (established through various priming manipulations) in which the cues are experienced. Study 1 will attempt to specify the conditions in which bodily affective states influence memory processes, whereas Study 2 will attempt to specify the conditions in which those influences should be absent. Those two experiments involve manipulating the applicability of information derived from bodily cues. In studies 3 and 5 we will further explore to what extent bodily information is contextually constrained. Study 3 will address whether bodily cues of fear lead to a general attentional bias toward all emotional stimuli when their meaning is not further specified. In contrast, studies 4 and 5 will explore the boundary conditions in which diffuse vigilance associated with the bodily state of fear can be channeled into attention specifically directed toward information relevant to personal concerns. The methodological advantage to studying expressions is that, whereas creating emotions of fear for research is problematic, our initial results suggest that many of the cognitive consequences of fear (and perhaps other emotions) are elicited when the particular embodiments of the emotion are expressions rather than feelings.
| Schnall, Simone; Haidt, Jonathan; Clore, Gerald L et al. (2008) Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 34:1096-109 |
| Centerbar, David B; Schnall, Simone; Clore, Gerald L et al. (2008) Affective incoherence: when affective concepts and embodied reactions clash. J Pers Soc Psychol 94:560-78 |
