In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is "ahead" and the past is "behind." Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals' minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people's minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.

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People implicitly associate positive ideas with their dominant side of space and negative ideas with their non-dominant side. Right-handers tend to associate "good" with "right" and "bad" with "left," but left-handers associate "bad" with "right" and "good" with "left." Whereas right-handers' implicit associations align with idioms in language and culture that link "good" with "right," left-handers' implicit associations go against them. Can cultural conventions modulate the body-specific association between valence and left-right space? Here, we compared people from Spanish and Moroccan cultures, which differ in the strength of taboos against the use of the left hand, and therefore in their preference for the right. Results showed stronger explicit associations between space and valence in Moroccan participants than in Spaniards, but they did not show any increased tendency for right-handed Moroccans to associate "good" with "right" implicitly. Despite differences in cultural conventions between Spaniards and Moroccans, we find no evidence for a cross-cultural difference in the implicit association between space and valence, which appears to depend on patterns of bodily experience.

The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for embodied number representations and to support strong claims about the link between number and space (e.g., a mental number line). We attempted to replicate Experiment 2 of Fischer et al. by collecting data from 1,105 participants at 17 labs. Across all 1,105 participants and four interstimulus-interval conditions, the proportion of times the effect we observed was positive (i.e., directionally consistent with the original effect) was .50. Further, the effects we observed both within and across labs were minuscule and incompatible with those observed by Fischer et al. Given this, we conclude that we failed to replicate the effect reported by Fischer et al. In addition, our analysis of several participant-level moderators (finger-counting habits, reading and writing direction, handedness, and mathematics fluency and mathematics anxiety) revealed no substantial moderating effects. Our results indicate that the Att-SNARC effect cannot be used as evidence to support strong claims about the link between number and space.

The concepts of "good" and "bad" are associated with right and left space. Individuals tend to associate good things with the side of their dominant hand, where they experience greater motor fluency, and bad things with their nondominant side. This mapping has been shown to be flexible: Changing the relative fluency of the hands, or even observing a change in someone else's motor fluency, results in a reversal of the conceptual mapping, such that good things become associated with the side of the nondominant hand. Yet, based on prior studies, it is unclear whether space-valence associations were determined by the experience of fluent versus disfluent actions, or by the mere expectation of fluency. Here, we tested the role of expected fluency by removing motor execution and perceptual feedback altogether. Participants were asked to imagine themselves performing a psychomotor task with one of their hands impaired, after which their implicit space-valence mapping was measured. After imagining that their right hand was impaired, right-handed participants showed the "good is left" association typical of left-handers. Motor imagery can change people's implicit associations between space and emotional valence. Although asymmetric motor experience may be necessary to establish body-specific associations between space and valence initially, neither motoric nor perceptual experience is needed to change these associations subsequently. The mere expectation of fluent versus disfluenct actions can drive fluency-based effects on people's implicit spatialization of "good" and "bad." These results suggest a reconsideration of the mechanisms and boundary conditions of fluency effects.

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We applied the use of thermography to cognitive neuropsychology, particularly as an objective marker of subjective experiences, in the context of lying. We conducted three experiments: (a) An important lie was invented by the participants in 3 min, and it was recounted by phone to a significant person while they were recorded by the thermographic camera, obtaining a face and hands map of the lie. (b) A similar methodology was carried out, but adding the Cold Stress Test (CST) of the dominant hand during the phone call, obtaining a second physiologic marker (the percentage of thermal recovery) to detect the lie. Further, it established a control condition where it generated anxiety in the participants using IAPS images with negative valence and high arousal, which were described by phone to a loved one. We obtained results that showed significant correlations between changes in body temperature and mental set. Of particular interest was the temperature of the nose and hand, which tended to decrease during lying (Experiment 1). The participants also showed a lower recovery of the temperature after the CST when they were lying (Experiment 2). (c) Experiment 3 is a replication of Experiment 2 but with a different type of lie (a more ecological task) in a different scenario (following the ACID interview, with the use of the phone eliminated and participants motivated to lie well). The main pattern of results was replicated. We obtained an accuracy of 85% in detection of deception with 25% of false alarms.