magazine issue 4 2014 / Issue 20

Manipulating the body, measuring the body, and tinkering in the name of Psychology

• written by Thomas Schubert
• edited by Spike Lee

Number size is embodied on a spatial dimension from left to right: Because we write from left to right, we come to associate “become more” or “later” or “larger”, and also “impact” and “agency” with the movement towards the right. Among people who learn to write from right to left (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu), this is reversed! Again, the manipulate-the-body strategy works: When participants from left-to-right cultures are induced to lean to the right, they estimate buildings to be larger than when they are induced to lean to the left (Eerland, Guadalupe, & Zwaan, 2011).

Power is embodied in certain postures and gestures: When participants are put into a typical “power pose” (think Superman), or to make a gesture associated with winning (e.g. raising a fist), they feel more powerful (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010; Schubert & Koole, 2009). (Watch the TED talk by Amy Cuddy [http://on.ted.com/Cuddy] for more details.).

Experiments of this style are often easy to conduct – they require single participant experimentation, but no complicated equipment or measures (the study from Eerland et al., 2011 cited above is an exception, it used a Wii balance board to trick participants into leaning to the side). Indeed, the simplicity of combining an embodied manipulation with a questionnaire is part of the charm of these experiments. Consequently, many more such studies exist (see Barsalou, 2008; Glenberg, 2010; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Landau, Robinson, & Meier, 2013).

Despite their elegance, these studies also have a problem: They tend to be open for alternative explanations. In particular, even when experimenters make the manipulation unobtrusive, it might happen that the participants spontaneously and consciously judge the sensations they experience, such as “wow, this book is really heavy”. The experimenters typically debrief carefully to check for such spontaneous judgments, but it is possible that we sometimes miss them. It might not sound like a big deal, but if participants do explicitly think about the manipulated sensation, this creates a problem for the interpretation of the studies. The problem is that they can then be explained by other processes than embodied concepts – for instance by judgments based on general knowledge about the world. As a result, the embodiment research has a problem: It has an easy way to come up with elegant studies, but their interpretation is sometimes difficult.

Manipulating thought and measuring the body

What can be done about this? It seems that one way out of this dilemma is to reverse the experiments. Instead of manipulating the body and measuring thought, researchers could manipulate what participants are thinking and feeling, and measure their bodily behaviour. If the mind is truly embodied, the effects should go both ways: Thinking and feeling should influence the body, even if no specific behavioural intention is executed.

Indeed that is what some researchers have been doing. Several properties of the living, breathing, moving human body have been measured in such studies.

Think back to the studies showing that inducing approach to objects results in liking them more. The obvious reversal would be to test whether we indeed spontaneously and quite unconsciously approach positive objects and avoid negative ones, even if we do not have to actually move around. Eerland and colleagues tested this by asking their participants to stand on a WII balance board – a component of the computer game platform that measures where you place your centre of gravity. Participants viewed strongly positive and negative pictures on a computer screen while standing on this platform. In the first second of just viewing, participants indeed swayed slightly forward towards positive pictures, but did not move much when seeing negative pictures (Eerland, Guadalupe, Franken, & Zwaan, 2012). Watch out how you sway the next time you see something (or somebody) really attractive.

Experimenters have also observed how our bodies react to words. For instance, Suzanne Oosterwijk and colleagues asked the participants in their study to generate words related to disappointment or pride (and also neutral words) (Oosterwijk, Rotteveel, Fischer, & Hess, 2009). Unbeknown to the participants, the researchers tracked their head postures. Participants wore head phones that were marked with a yellow patch, and they were filmed by a hidden camera. The researchers later painstakingly analysed the clips frame by frame tracking the position of the yellow patch. They found that while participants generated words of disappointment, their heads literally sank into despair, while they staid levelled and even initially rose a little when generating words of pride.

In a similar study, participants were asked to think about what their life had been like four years earlier, or to think about what their life would be like in four years (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010). They were doing that while standing upright, blindfolded to facilitate vivid imagery, and with a motion tracking sensor attached to their leg above the knee. When thinking about the past, participants slightly leaned backward, but when thinking about the future, they slightly leaned forward. Presumably, the way we think about time is not completely abstract – we mentally represent it on a path through space, with the past behind us and the future in front. When we mentally travel in time, we physically try to move there as well.