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Valence and concreteness in item recognition: Evidence against the affective embodiment account

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Abstract

The Affective Embodiment Account posits that sensorimotor interactions play an important role in learning and processing concrete words whereas experiences from emotional states play an important role in learning and processing abstract words. Because of this, there should be greater enhancement of valence for abstract than for concrete words and therefore there should be an interaction between valence and concreteness. Although this prediction has been observed in a number of tasks, very few studies have looked specifically at memory. Three experiments are reported that assess whether valence interacts with concreteness in recognition. In Experiment 1, recognition of concrete words was better than abstract, but there was no difference as a function of whether the words were positive or negative and there was no interaction. Experiment 2 compared positive and neutral words and Experiment 3 compared negative and neutral words; in both, there was a concreteness effect but no effect of valence and no interaction. These results replicate previous findings that when positive and negative words are equated more fully, valence has no effect on recognition, and also suggest a limit on the scope of the Affective Embodiment Account.

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Data availability

Data and stimuli are available via the Open Science Framework at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F6TPN

Notes

  1. Kim et al. (2020) made their data available, which enabled a re-analysis using Bayesian analysis of variance. The description in this paragraph is based on our Bayesian re-analysis.

  2. Full details, including R code, are available via the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F6TPN

  3. The stimuli for all experiments, as well as analyses showing there were no significant differences on these dimensions, are available via the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F6TPN.

  4. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this possibility.

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Code availability

Custom code is available via the Open Science Framework at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F6TPN

Author Notes

This work was supported, in part, by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to DG. Order of authorship is alphabetical.

Open practices statement

The stimuli, simulation code, raw data, and supplementary analyses are available via the Open Science Framework at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F6TPN.

Funding

Portions of the research were supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to DG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA

    Tamra J. Bireta

  2. School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Dominic Guitard

  3. Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Ian Neath & Aimée M. Surprenant

Authors
  1. Tamra J. Bireta
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  2. Dominic Guitard
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  3. Ian Neath
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  4. Aimée M. Surprenant
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Correspondence to Ian Neath.

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Bireta, T.J., Guitard, D., Neath, I. et al. Valence and concreteness in item recognition: Evidence against the affective embodiment account. Psychon Bull Rev (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02442-8

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