Spatializing Emotion: No Evidence for a Domain-General Magnitude System

Looks like SNARC spirit: Coexistence of short- and long-term associations between letters and space

Many studies have demonstrated spatial-numerical associations, but the debate about their origin is still ongoing. Some approaches consider cardinality representations in long-term memory, such as a Mental Number Line, while others suggest ordinality representations, for both numerical and non-numerical stimuli, originating in working or long-term memory. To investigate how long-term memory and working memory influence spatial associations and to disentangle the role of cardinality and ordinality, we ran three preregistered online experiments (Ntotal = 515). We assessed spatial response preferences for letters (which only convey ordinal but no cardinal information, in contrast to numbers) in a bimanual go/no-go consonant-vowel classification task. Experiment 1 ("no-go" trials: non-letter symbols) validated our setup. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants learned an ordinal letter sequence prior to the task, which they recalled afterwards. In Experiment 2, this sequence was merely maintained ("no-go" trials: non-letter symbols), whereas in Experiment 3, it needed to be retrieved during the task ("no-go" trials: letters outside the sequence). We replicated letter-space associations based on the alphabet stored in long-term memory (i.e., letters earlier/later in the alphabet associated with left/right, respectively) in all experiments. However, letter-space associations based on the working memory sequence (i.e., letters earlier/later in the sequence associated with left/right, respectively) were only detected in Experiment 3, where retrieval occurred during the task. Spatial short- and long-term associations of letters therefore seem to coexist. These findings support a hybrid model that incorporates both short- and long-term representations, which applies similarly to letters as to numbers.

'Magic cosmetic fillers': Appearance-enhancement effects on self-face recognition

People naturally exhibit a self-serving bias which can be observed in their tendency to judge their own physical attractiveness more favourably than that of others. Despite this positive self-perception, minimally invasive cosmetic injectable procedures for facial rejuvenation and enhancement are becoming increasingly common. It remains unclear, however, whether recognizing an altered version of one's own face, enhanced cosmetically, correlates with a positive view of cosmetic surgery and excessive preoccupations about physical characteristics perceived as defects (body dysmorphic concerns). In this study, 30 healthy female participants, aged 18-24 years (Mage = 21.1 years, SD = 1.6), engaged in a face recognition task during which their faces were digitally morphed with that of gender-matched unfamiliar women who had undergone cosmetic enhancements, specifically lip and cheek fillers. The duration of exposure to these modified faces varied with short (500 msec) and long (2000 msec) viewing periods. Participants were asked to identify whether the digital morphs represented themselves or the other woman. Self-reports regarding acceptance of cosmetic surgery and dysmorphic concerns were collected. Participants PSE indicated a tendency towards self-bias under short presentation times, shifting towards the other as presentation times lengthened. Interestingly, this effect was associated with greater acceptance of cosmetic surgery and higher body dysmorphic concerns. This study underscores the importance of understanding how perceptions of others' physical appearances can influence self-recognition and attitudes towards cosmetic surgery, which may have both positive and potentially harmful implications.

Gazing left, gazing right: exploring a spatial bias in social attention

Faces oriented rightwards are sometimes perceived as more dominant than faces oriented leftwards. In this study, we explored whether faces oriented rightwards can also elicit increased attentional orienting. Participants completed a discrimination task in which they were asked to discriminate, by means of a keypress, a peripheral target. At the same time, a task-irrelevant face oriented leftwards or rightwards appeared at the centre of the screen. The results showed that, while for faces oriented rightwards targets appearing on the right were responded to faster as compared to targets appearing on the left, for faces oriented leftwards no differences emerged between left and right targets. Furthermore, we also found a negative correlation between the magnitude of the orienting response elicited by the faces oriented leftwards and the level of conservatism of the participants. Overall, these findings provide evidence for the existence of a spatial bias reflected in social orienting.

Attentional capture in emotion comparison is orientation independent

Recent findings on emotion comparison show a typical pattern of motor reactivity rising from attentional capture. When pairs of emotional faces are presented simultaneously, the most intense emotional face is recognized faster (Emotional Semantic Congruency-ESC effect). Furthermore, a global response speed advantage for emotional pairs with positive rather than negative average emotion intensity is observed (i.e., emotional size effect), with the choice for the happiest face resulting in a faster response than the choice for the angriest face within the pair (i.e., the happiness advantage). In two experiments, we asked whether these effects are orientation dependent, and thus linked to whether face processing is holistic or part-based. Participants were asked to choose the angriest/happiest face in emotional pairs displayed either in upright or inverted orientation and including (Experiment 1) or not including (Experiment 2) a neutral face. Beyond an overall facilitation for upright relative to inverted pairs, results showed orientation independent ESC and emotional size effects. Furthermore, the happiness advantage was present in emotional pairs of Experiment 2 but not in emotional pairs of Experiment 1, independently from face orientation. Together, results suggest that attentional capture in emotion comparison is immaterial on the type of face processing, being orientation invariant.

Reading/writing direction as a source of directional bias in spatial cognition: Possible mechanisms and scope

Becoming literate has been argued to have a range of social, economic and psychological effects. Less examined is the extent to which repercussions of becoming literate may vary as a function of writing system variation. A salient way in which writing systems differ is in their directionality. Recent studies have claimed that directional biases in a variety of spatial domains are attributable to reading and writing direction. This claim is the focus of the present paper, which considers the scope and possible mechanisms underlying script directionality effects in spatial cognition, with particular attention to domains with real-world relevance. Three questions are addressed: (1) What are possible mediating and moderator variables relevant to script directionality effects in spatial cognition? (2) Does script directionality exert a fixed or a malleable effect? and (3) How can script directionality effects be appropriately tested? After discussing these questions in the context of specific studies, we highlight general methodological issues in this literature and provide recommendations for the design of future research.

Spatial metaphors and the design of everyday things

People use space (e.g., left-right, up-down) to think about a variety of non-spatial concepts like time, number, similarity, and emotional valence. These spatial metaphors can be used to inform the design of user interfaces, which visualize many of these concepts in space. Traditionally, researchers have relied on patterns in language to discover habits of metaphorical thinking. However, advances in cognitive science have revealed that many spatial metaphors remain unspoken, shaping people's preferences, memories, and actions independent of language - and even in contradiction to language. Here we argue that cognitive science can impact our everyday lives by informing the design of physical and digital objects via the spatial metaphors in people's minds. We propose a simple principle for predicting which spatial metaphors organize people's non-spatial concepts based on the structure of their linguistic, cultural, and bodily experiences. By leveraging the latent metaphorical structure of people's minds, we can design objects and interfaces that help people think.

Testing the body specificity hypothesis: A comparative study of the Persian language and the Persian Sign language

The present study explores the role of language in establishing the lateral space-valence mappings in mind. According to the body specificity hypothesis, regardless of linguistic and cultural conventions, "goodness" in people's minds is associated with the body's dominant side. The current study explores the language's influence on conceptualizing spatial metaphors by comparing two right-handed groups with similar cultural experiences but different language patterns. We used a computer-based task to compare the conceptual mappings between the right/left sides of space and emotional valence in Persian speakers and Persian Sign language users. Our result showed that right-handed Persian speakers strongly relate positive emotions to the right side and negative emotions to the left. This result is predictable by the effects of both linguistic and bodily experiences that are consistent in this case. However, in the case of Persian Sign language users, the bodily and linguistic experiences disagreed. Our finding showed that Sign language participants disregarding their bodily experiences, followed their linguistic patterns.

Cross-cultural evidence of a space-ethnicity association in face categorisation

According to a space-valence association, individuals tend to relate negatively- and positively-connoted stimuli with the left and right side of space, respectively. So far, only a few studies have explored whether this phenomenon can also emerge for social dimensions associated with facial stimuli. Here, we adopted a cross-cultural approach and conducted two experiments with the main aim to test whether a left–right space-valence association can also emerge for other- vs. own-race faces. Asian Japanese (Experiment 1) and White Italian (Experiment 2) participants engaged in a speeded binary classification task in which a central placed face had to be classified as either Asian or White. Manual responses were provided through a left- vs. right-side button. In both experiments, other-race faces elicited faster responses than own-race faces, in line with the well-documented other-race categorisation advantage. Moreover, evidence of an association between space and ethnic membership also arose and, interestingly, was similar in both groups. Indeed, Asian faces were responded to faster with the right-side key than with the left-side key, whereas response side had no effect for White faces. These results are discussed with regard to possible cross-cultural differences in group perception.

The Order of Magnitude: Why SNARC-like Tasks (Still) Cannot Support a Generalized Magnitude System

According to proponents of the generalized magnitude system proposal (GMS), SNARC-like effects index spatial mappings of magnitude and provide crucial evidence for the existence of a GMS. Casasanto and Pitt (2019) have argued that these effects, instead, reflect mappings of ordinality, which people compute on the basis of differences among stimuli that vary either qualitatively (e.g., musical pitches) or quantitatively (e.g., dots of different sizes). In response to our paper, Prpic et al. (2021) argued that both magnitude and ordinality play a role in SNARC-like effects. Here, we address each of their arguments and conclude that magnitude is relevant to these effects only insofar as it serves as a basis for ordinality. For this reason and others, SNARC or SNARC-like effects cannot provide evidence for the putative generalized magnitude system.

Is Face Age Mapped Asymmetrically onto Space? Insights from a SNARC-like Task

The magnitude associated with a stimulus can be spatially connoted, with relatively smaller and larger magnitudes that would be represented on the left and on the right side of space, respectively. According to recent evidence, this space–magnitude association could reflect specific brain asymmetries. In this study, we explored whether such an association can also emerge for face age, assuming that responders should represent relatively younger and older adult faces on the left and on the right, respectively. A sample of young adults performed a speeded binary classification task aimed at categorising the age of a centrally placed adult face stimulus as either younger or older than the age of a reference face. A left-side and a right-side response key were used to collect manual responses. Overall, older faces were categorised faster than younger faces, and response latencies decreased with the absolute difference between the age of the target stimulus and the age of the reference, in line with a distance effect. However, no evidence of a left-to-right spatial representation of face age emerged. Taken together, these results suggest that face age is mapped onto space differently from other magnitudes.

Neural Basis of the Sound-Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondence Between Auditory Pseudowords and Visual Shapes

Sound symbolism refers to the association between the sounds of words and their meanings, often studied using the crossmodal correspondence between auditory pseudowords, e.g., 'takete' or 'maluma', and pointed or rounded visual shapes, respectively. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants were presented with pseudoword-shape pairs that were sound-symbolically congruent or incongruent. We found no significant congruency effects in the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal when participants were attending to visual shapes. During attention to auditory pseudowords, however, we observed greater BOLD activity for incongruent compared to congruent audiovisual pairs bilaterally in the intraparietal sulcus and supramarginal gyrus, and in the left middle frontal gyrus. We compared this activity to independent functional contrasts designed to test competing explanations of sound symbolism, but found no evidence for mediation via language, and only limited evidence for accounts based on multisensory integration and a general magnitude system. Instead, we suggest that the observed incongruency effects are likely to reflect phonological processing and/or multisensory attention. These findings advance our understanding of sound-to-meaning mapping in the brain.

Emotional SNARC: emotional faces affect the impact of number magnitude on gaze patterns

The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect is characterised by a spatial cognitive representation of low numbers to the left side of space and high numbers to the right side of space. This effect has been found using a diversity of stimuli and experimental paradigms. However, the influence of emotional stimuli on this effect remains unclear. In this study, the SNARC effect is analysed in relation to pairs of emotional facial stimuli (happy-neutral, sad-neutral and happy-sad pairs). Gaze patterns of 151 participants were analysed when exposed to a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm consisting of pairs of emotional faces preceded by small and large numbers. Replicating previous results, a standard SNARC effect was found independently of the emotional expressions of the faces (i.e., there was a significant linear trend of number magnitude in the frequency of first fixations of the gaze to the left side space). However, specific slope analyses revealed that the SNARC effect was influenced by the spatial position of each emotion presented in the emotional pairs. Specifically, the effect disappeared in happy-neutral trials, when the happy faces were allocated in the right position and also in happy-sad trials when two emotional stimuli were simultaneously displayed. The study revealed that the SNARC effect is sensitive to the spatial position of emotional stimuli which further adds to other known limits of the phenomenon. The limitations of the study and its implications in the area of cognition and emotion are also discussed.

Spatializing Emotions Besides Magnitudes: Is There a Left-to-Right Valence or Intensity Mapping?

The Spatial–Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC), namely the automatic association between smaller numbers and left space and between larger numbers and right space, is often attributed to a Mental Number Line (MNL), in which magnitudes would be placed left-to-right. Previous studies have suggested that the MNL could be extended to emotional processing. In this study, participants were asked to carry out a parity judgment task (categorizing one to five digits as even or odd) and an emotional judgment task, in which emotional smilies were presented with four emotional expressions (very sad, sad, happy, very happy). Half of the sample was asked to categorize the emotional valence (positive or negative valence), the other half was asked to categorize the emotional intensity (lower or higher intensity). The results of the parity judgment task confirmed the expected SNARC effect. In the emotional judgment task, the performance of both subgroups was better for happy than for sad expressions. Importantly, a better performance was found only in the valence task for lower intensity stimuli categorized with the left hand and for higher intensity stimuli categorized with the right hand, but only for happy smilies. The present results show that neither emotional valence nor emotional intensity alone are spatialized left-to-right, suggesting that magnitudes and emotions are processed independently from one another, and that the mental representation of emotions could be more complex than the bi-dimentional left-to-right spatialization found for numbers.

Large as being on top of the world and small as hitting the roof: a common magnitude representation for the comparison of emotions and numbers

Previous work on the direct speed-intensity association (SIA) on comparative judgement tasks involved spatially distributed responses over spatially distributed stimuli with high motivational significance like facial expressions of emotions. This raises the possibility that the inferred stimulus-driven regulation of lateralized motor reactivity described by SIA, which was against the one expected on the basis of a valence-specific lateral bias, was entirely due to attentional capture from motivational significance (beyond numerical cognition). In order to establish the relevance of numerical cognition on the regulation of attentional capture we ran two complementary experiments. These involved the same direct comparison task on stimulus pairs that were fully comparable in terms of their analog representation of intensity but with different representational domain and motivational significance: symbolic magnitudes with low motivational significance in experiment 1 vs. emotions with rather high motivational significance in experiment 2. The results reveal a general SIA and point to a general mechanism regulating comparative judgements. This is based on the way spatial attention is captured toward locations that contain the stimulus which is closest in term of relative intensity to the extremal values of the series, regardless from its representational domain being it symbolic or emotional.

The Body in Religion: The Spatial Mapping of Valence in Tibetan Practitioners of Bön

According to the Body-Specificity Hypothesis (BSH), people implicitly associate positive ideas with the side of space on which they are able to act more fluently with their dominant hand. Though this hypothesis has been rigorously tested across a variety of populations and tasks, the studies thus far have only been conducted in linguistic and cultural communities which favor the right over the left. Here, we tested the effect of handedness on implicit space-valence mappings in Tibetan practitioners of Bön who show a strong religious preference for the left, in comparison to an English group. Results showed that Bön right-handers tended to implicitly associate positive valence more strongly with their dominant side of space despite strong explicit associations between the left and goodness in their religion. This pattern of results found in Bön participants was indistinguishable from that found in English speakers. The findings of the present study support the BSH, demonstrating that space-valence mappings in people's minds are shaped by their bodily experience, which appears to be independent of space-valence mappings enshrined in cultural conventions.

Is Emotional Magnitude Spatialized? A Further Investigation

Accumulating evidence suggests that different magnitudes (e.g., number, size, and duration) are spatialized in the mind according to a common left-right metric, consistent with a generalized system for representing magnitude. A previous study conducted by two of us (Holmes & Lourenco, ) provided evidence that this metric extends to the processing of emotional magnitude, or the intensity of emotion expressed in faces. Recently, however, Pitt and Casasanto () showed that the earlier effects may have been driven by a left-right mapping of mouth size rather than emotional magnitude, and they found no evidence for an emotional magnitude mapping when using words as stimuli. Here, we report two new experiments that further examine these conclusions. In Experiment 1, using face stimuli with mouths occluded, we replicate the original finding: Less emotional faces were associated with the left and more emotional faces with the right. However, we also find that people can reliably infer the sizes of the occluded mouths, and that these inferred mouth sizes can explain the observed left-right mapping. In Experiment 2, we show that comparative judgments of emotional words yield a left-right mapping of emotional magnitude not attributable to stimulus confounds. Based on these findings, we concur with Pitt and Casasanto that faces pose challenges for isolating the forces driving spatialization, but we suggest that emotional magnitude, when assessed using unconfounded stimuli in a sufficiently sensitive task, may indeed be spatialized as originally proposed. Suggestions for further research on the spatialization of emotional magnitude are discussed.