According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects. Growing evidence shows these congruency effects do not always occur, suggesting instead that the grounded features in a word's meaning do not become active automatically across contexts. Researchers sometimes use this as evidence that concepts are not grounded, further concluding that grounded information is peripheral to the amodal cores of concepts. We first review broad evidence (...) that words do not have conceptual cores, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically. Then, in three experiments, we provide further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context, with the central grounded features in a concept becoming active only when the current context makes them salient. Even when grounded features are central to a word's meaning, their activation depends on task conditions. (shrink)

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1591-1607.

The current article discusses the distinction between affective valence—the degree to which an affective response represents pleasure or displeasure—and semantic valence, the degree to which an object or event is considered positive or negative. To date, measures that reflect positivity and negativity are usually placed under the same conceptual umbrella (e.g., valence, affective, emotional), with minimal distinction between the modes of valence they reflect. Recent work suggests that what might seem to reflect a monolithic structure of valence has at least (...) two different, confounding underlying sources, affective and semantic, that are fundamentally distinct, dissociable, and that obey different, recognizable rules. The current work discusses this distinction and provides implications for affective science from both the theoretical and the empirical perspective. (shrink)

I address the questions of whether cognitive methods are suited to the study of emotion, and whether they are suited to the study of the unique aspect of emotion. Based on a definition of cognitive processes as those that mediate between variable input–output relations by means of representations, and the observation that the relation between stimuli and emotions is often variable, I argue that cognition is often involved in emotion and that cognitive methods are suited to study them. I further (...) propose that the unique feature of emotion has to do with the content of the representations involved in the transition from stimulus input to emotion. Emotions are elicited when stimuli contain information about the satisfaction status of goals (i.e., when they are goal relevant). Given that cognitive methods are fit to study any representation-mediated process regardless of their content, they can a fortiori be used to study a process that operates on representations with goal-relevant content. I compare this process to processes that have no or a different relation to goals, including the process that deals with purely valenced information. (shrink)