Embodied Effect Occurs in the Early Phase of Emotional Cognitive Processes

Research shows that the process of understanding the emotions involves embodied simulation. The outer periphery of the body movement can activate the emotional perception. In this study, emotional words with positive, negative and neutral valence are used as stimulations. The emotional STROOP task is employed in this study, if a specific emotion has been received and processed by the participants; this would occupy a certain of cognition resources and thus make the following color naming test slower. This interference effect is called emotional STROOP effect. Through two organized experiments with different stimulus presentation time and emotional STROOP tasks, it has been explored that how embodied cognition affects the emotional cognitive processing in time-varying situations. Experiment one finds that: 1) when stimulus presents 10 ms to 500 ms, there has been an emotional STROOP effect; 2) within 10 ms to 100 ms of stimulus presentation time, emotional STROOP effect size increases linearly, but after 100 ms, there appears a sharp decline; the second experiment adds an embodied operation on the basis of experiment one in order to enhance or inhibit the participants’ understanding of emotion, the result of experiment 2 is a further verification that emotional STROOP effect shows a sharp decline after the 100 ms group due to the disappearance of embodied cognitive influence on emotional cognitive processing. These results indicate that one strategy of cognition system is using our body as a tool to understand the emotion effectively. But this strategy is not the only one and it has a time pressure. The embodied cognition works fast, but if, for some reason, the embodied cognition cannot aid the understanding of emotions, the abstract thinking can also guarantee that we understand the emotions. The result of this study may lead to a conclusion that embodied cognition does occur in the cognition process and body would be used in a rather early stage of the process of emotion understanding.