Abstract

Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emo-tion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where em-bodiment 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 inter-acts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demon-strations ofsocial embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account ofthem has been offered. We propose that theories ofembodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these find-ings, and that they also suggest exciting new directionsfor 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 agree-ment) while listening to persuasive messages led to more positive attitudes toward the message content than shaking the head (as in disagreement). Caciop-po, Priester, and Berntson (1993) observed that novel Chinese ideographs presented during arm flexion (an action associated with approach) were subsequently evaluated more favorably than ideographs presented during arm extension (an action associated with avoid-ance). Duclos et al. (1989) led participants to adopt The authors thank Vic Ferreira, Art Glenberg, Danny McIntosh, Randy O'Reilly, and Cathy Reed for their helpful comments on vari-