A Study On The Mechanism Of Representing The Valence And Arousal Of Emotional Concepts In Horizontal Space

People often use space to understand and characterize emotional concepts in their daily lives.However,there is a theoretical controversy between a theory of magnitude and the bodyspecificity hypothesis in explaining this understanding and representation process.In this study,we explored the mechanisms of representing emotional concepts in horizontal space in terms of emotional valence and arousal,respectively,through three behavioral experiments,based on the experimental paradigm of previous related studies,improved experimental materials,and introduced normal or crossed arms body postures.Experiment 1 was a 2(posture: normal,hands crossed)× 2(lexical arousal level: high arousal,low arousal)× 2(keystroke condition: "Q"-high arousal "P"-low arousal,"Q "-low arousal "P"-high arousal)in a three-factor mixed experimental design,where the subject task was arousal judgment,and the horizontal spatial mapping process of emotional word arousal was examined by changing the subject’s hand posture.The experimental results revealed that the interaction between arousal and key direction was significant with or without crossed hands,with high arousal emotional words responding significantly faster on the right side than on the left side,and low arousal emotional words responding significantly faster on the left side than on the right side.This indicates that there is a left-to-right,low-to-high arousal mapping in both horizontal directions.Experiment 2 was a three-factor mixed experimental design of 2(posture: normal,crossed hands)× 2(lexical valence: positive,negative)× 2(key conditions: "Q"-positive "P"-negative,"Q"-negative)The three-factor mixed experimental design,in which the subject’s task was to judge emotional valence,was used to examine the horizontal spatial mapping process of emotional word valence by changing the subject’s hand posture.The experimental results revealed that the interaction between valence and key direction was significant with or without crossed hands,with positive words responding significantly faster on the right side than on the left side and negative words responding significantly faster on the left side than on the right side.This indicates that there is a mapping of potency from left to right and from negative to positive in both horizontal directions.The experimental results of both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were consistent with the interpretation of a theory of magnitude.Experiment 3 was a three-factor mixed experimental design of 2(word valence: positive,negative)× 2(word arousal: high,low)× 2(keystroke direction: left,right),in which the subject task was an unrelated font judgment task,to investigate which dimension of emotional word valence and arousal was more dominant in the horizontal space mapping,and which dimension of valence and arousal was more strongly associated with the horizontal space mapping.The interaction between valence and keystroke direction was found to be significant,with negative words being significantly faster than positive words on the left side of the keystroke and positive words being significantly faster than negative words on the right side of the keystroke.The interaction between arousal and keystroke direction,another aspect,was not significant.This indicates that only validity is mapped to the horizontal space in the irrelevant task condition.The results of the three experiments combined showed that a theory of magnitude was more reasonable in explaining the mechanism of emotion concept representation in horizontal space.The mapping of valence in the horizontal direction was more automatic in the irrelevant task condition,and the strength of the mapping association between arousal and horizontal space was weaker.