Research On The Relationship Between Valence、Arousal And Hand Motor Experience Under The Condition Of Implicit And Explicit

The view of embodied emotion argues that emotion is embodied in persons’ bodies, including persons’ brains. The body anatomy, body activities, and the perceptual and motor experience of the body determine how we process emotional information. Similarly, it will causes changes in our body when process emotional information. The current studies show that right-handers tend to respond faster with the right hand to the positive stimulus and the left hand to the negative stimulus when participants perform a valence judgment. While left-handers show the opposite result. We don’t observe the association between valance and hand in the implicit emotion task. The most likely is that the association between valence and hand cannot be activated automatically when participants’ attention is not explicitly focused on the valence of stimuli. In previous studies, researchers ignore the influence of the arousal. So we put the arousal into the research system, and explore whether the association between valence and hand emerged in the emotional faces.This research includes two experiments. In experiment1, participants performed a gender judgment task. The design of experiment is2(emotional valence:positive, negative)×2(arousal:high, low)×2(response hand:left hand, right hand) within subject design. In experiment2, participants performed a valence judgment task. The design of experiment2is the same with experiment1. The experimental materials were selected from Chinese Facial Affective Picture System which had been matched in gender, valence and arousal.The results of experiment1show that there is no significant interaction between hand and valence, which means no association between hand and valence. The interaction between hand and arousal is significant. There is no significant difference between low arousal faces and high arousal faces with the left hand, however, participants reacted faster to low arousal faces with their right hand than high arousal faces. Besides we found the left-right effects of gender. Participants reacted faster to male faces with their left hand and female faces with their right hand. This means the processing of gender is meet the theory conceptual metaphor.In experiment2, a main effect for valence emerged, with faster responses to positive than to negative faces. A main effect for arousal was found, high arousal faces led to short RTs than low arousal faces. There is also a main effect for hand, with right-hand responses being faster than left-hand responses. However, we found no significant interaction between hand and valence. The interaction between hand and arousal is also not significant. There is no body specific association between hands and emotion.According to this research, we draw the following conclusions:(1) There is no body specific association between hand and emotion in the task of judging emotional faces’ gender. The reaction of the left and right hand is affected by the arousal, especially to the right hand.(2) Under the condition of emotional implicit processing, the valence and arousal degree are not independent.(3) We found the embodiment effects of gender in the gender judgment task.(4) There is no body specific association between hand and emotion in the task of judging valence. This specific association can be activated, but affected by the inherent differences in left and right hand.