Contrasting vertical and horizontal representations of affect in emotional visual search

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3758/s13423-015-0884-6Independent lines of evidence suggest that the representation of emotional evaluation recruits both vertical and horizontal spatial mappings. These two spatial mappings differ in their experiential origins and their productivity, and available data suggest that they differ in their saliency. Yet, no study has so far compared their relative strength in an attentional orienting reaction time task that affords the simultaneous manifestation of both of them. Here we investigated this question using a visual search task with emotional faces. We presented angry and happy face targets and neutral distracter faces in top, bottom, left, and right locations on the computer screen. Conceptual congruency effects were observed along the vertical dimension supporting the ‘up=good’ metaphor, but not along the horizontal dimension. This asymmetrical processing pattern was observed when faces were presented in a cropped (Experiment 1) and whole (Experiment 2) format. These findings suggest that the ‘up=good’ metaphor is more salient and readily activated than the ‘right=good’ metaphor, and that the former outcompetes the latter when the task context affords the simultaneous activation of both mappings

Influencing appraisals of emotional valence with spatial touchscreen interactions: An embodied approach to Positive Technology

Could bodily interactions with touchscreen interfaces influence users´s affective experiences? The present dissertation investigates, from an embodied perspective, the potential of touchscreen interfaces as "positive technologies". Positive Technology is an emergent research area within the fields of Cyberpsychology and Human-Computer Interaction interested in examining and promote the quality of user´s affective experiences. However, despite touchscreens enable the manipulation of digital contents directly with the hands, very little is known about how such physical interaction may influence user´s affectivity. This question was approached from theory and research on embodied cognition, which postulate that perception and action influence cognitive and emotional functioning. Specifically, it was considered the integration of (a) research on embodied interaction with touchscreen interfaces suggesting that manipulating visual contents (e.g., images) with directional interaction gestures (e.g., swiping) may stimulate their meaningful cognitive representation; and (b) experimental findings in psychology indicating that the processing of emotional valence is strongly associated with bodily dimensions of space and related directional arm movements (i.e., horizontal, vertical, and sagittal). Against this background, right-handed subjects swiped positive and negative emotional pictures on a horizontal (Study 1), vertical (Study 2), and sagittal (Study 3) space of a touchscreen monitor. Concretely, it was examined if and how such interactions would influence subjects´affectivity as reflected in their valence appraisals towards the pictures. The crucial finding was that all studies revealed affective matchings between the pictures´ valence category and the spatial touchscreen interactions, whereby these matchings mostly led to positive appraisals. Conversely, mismatchings generally led to negative appraisals. Positive Technology fields might benefit from these findings, which boundaries will be discussed in light of embodiment theory and action planning paradigms

Degrees of metaphoricity: a quantitative gesture analysis

When a speaker uses a linguistic metaphor, how do we know that they are thinking metaphorically? One answer is by looking at their gestures (e.g., Müller, 2008). In this thesis, I propose three criteria for identifying whether a speaker is thinking metaphorically: gesture cooccurrence, gestural fit and gestural effort (see Hostetter & Alibali, 2008). I also appeal to Müller’s (2008) conception of metaphoricity as a gradable phenomenon. Using these three criteria, I conduct a large-scale, quantitative analysis of gestures in the TV News Archive, focusing on linguistic metaphors of emotional valence (‘low standards, ‘high standards’, ‘lower the standards’, ‘raise the standards’). I also look at factors that may affect the metaphoric activation of these linguistic metaphors, and whether speakers gesture in line with other conceptual metaphors of emotional valence (e.g., Casasanto, 2009). Finally, I look at whether articulatory plurality, a widely-reported feature of sign languages (e.g., Börstell et al., 2016c), can be found in co-speech gestures. Amongst other results, I find high levels of gesture co-occurrence (85.3%), gestural fit (61.5%) and gestural effort (70.8%) for all four linguistic metaphors. I also find that metaphorical verbs (‘lower’, ‘raise’) are more likely to be understood metaphorically than metaphorical adjectives (‘low’, ‘high’)