Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain’s modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demonstrations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them has been offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these findings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach. Consider the following findings. Wells and Petty (1980) reported that nodding the head (as in agreement)

The authors propose that people adopt others ’ perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others ’ perceptions were consistent with one’s own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another’s perception would be different from—rather than similar to—their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases increased under time pressure (Study 2) and decreased with accuracy incentives (Study 3). Egocentric biases also increased when participants were more inclined to accept plausible values encountered early in the adjustment process than when inclined to reject them (Study 4). Finally, adjustments tend to be insufficient, in part, because people stop adjusting once a plausible estimate is reached (Study 5). We have endeavored to show... that thought in the child is egocentric, i.e., that the child thinks for himself without troubling to make himself understood nor to place himself at the other person’s point of view.... If this be the case, we must expect childish reasoning to differ very considerably from ours, to be deductive and above all less rigorous. (Piaget, 1959, p. 1) Children view their perceptions of the world as accurate reflections

Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves partial reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. On this view, the processing of emotion knowledge involves a (partial) reexperience of an emotion, but only when access to the sensory basis of emotion knowledge is required by the task. In 2 experiments, participants judged emotional and neutral concepts corresponding to concrete objects (Experiment 1) and abstract states (Experiment 2) while facial electromyographic activity was recorded from the cheek, brow, eye, and nose regions. Results of both studies show embodiment of specific emotions in an emotion-focused but not a perceptual-focused processing task on the same words. A follow up in Experiment 3, which blocked selective facial expressions, suggests a causal, rather than simply a correlational, role for embodiment in emotion word processing. Experiment 4, using a property generation task, provided support for the conclusion that emotions embodied in conceptual tasks are context-dependent situated simulations rather than associated emotional reactions. Implications for theories of embodied simulation and for emotion theories are discussed.

Speed/accuracy decisions in task performance: Built-in trade-off

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and non-experiential routes of motor influences on affect and evaluation