The role of social and emotional experience in representing abstract words

Daria Goriachun, Kristof Strijkers, Núria Gala, Johannes C Ziegler (Eq. LAMA)

Abstract words challenge embodied cognition theories due to their lack of direct connections to the sensory and bodily world. To address this, some theories propose that abstract words are represented through emotional and social information. We tested these theories across seven experiments using semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks in two languages. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects of emotional valence, socialness and sensory experience in a large-scale study using a lexical decision task. We found that positive valence and socialness facilitates word recognition. In Experiment 2, we explored socialness and its interaction with concreteness in two semantic categorization tasks in English and French. While concreteness consistently facilitated word recognition, the effects of socialness varied across languages. In Experiment 3, we used the same tasks to investigate the effects of emotional valence, showing that valence facilitated abstract word recognition in both languages, but only if the task required decisions about valence. In Experiments 4-7, we primed lexical decision and semantic categorization of target words by social or affective primes. Affective priming enhanced the valence effect, whereas socialness priming did not enhance the socialness effects. Overall, our data provide evidence that emotional valence plays a strategic role in the processing of abstract words, while socialness does not seem to influence the processing of abstract words.