Can Culture Influence Body‐Specific Associations Between Space and Valence?

Abstract

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.

Contrasting vertical and horizontal representations of affect in emotional visual search

“…If language and culture (which are shared by right-and left-handers) contribute to the learning of this conceptual mapping, their influence should add to that of embodied experiences (which differ in right-and lefthanders), leading to a stronger bias in right-handers than in left-handers. Even when the right-handers came from a Muslim culture (Morocco) with very strong beliefs against the left and in favour of the right, the strength of their 'right = good' association did not differ from Western participants (de la Fuente, Casasanto, Román & Santiago, 2014). Further evidence demonstrating the experiential basis of the 'right = good' mapping is found in experimental manipulations that promote greater motor fluency in participants' non-dominant hand.…”

Observed actions affect body-specific associations between space and valence

“…In short, we know that this task reveals implicit space-valence associations because most participants are unable to make the correct reason for their responses explicit. In a previous study in Spanish left-and right-handers, when participants were asked why they placed the good animal in the chosen box, most participants answered "I don't know," and only a small percentage (2% -2 out of 100 participants) guessed the main factor that drove their choices: handedness (de la Fuente et al, 2014). After performing another version of the Bob task, US participants with pronounced right or left hemiparesis underwent a funneled debriefing, at the end of which they were asked, "Do you think that the way you use your hands had anything to do with the way you responded on this task?"…”

“…A full discussion of this issue has been provided elsewhere (Casasanto, 2009;de la Fuente, Casasanto, Román, & Santiago, 2014). In short, we know that this task reveals implicit space-valence associations because most participants are unable to make the correct reason for their responses explicit.…”

The Body in Religion: The Spatial Mapping of Valence in Tibetan Practitioners of Bön

“…Though De la Fuente et al (2015) showed that stringent taboos against the left in Moroccan culture did not contribute to the strength of the good-is-right mapping in righthanders, a more definitive answer to the question of whether people immersed in Moroccan culture are resistant to the implicit body-based good-is-left mapping would come from Moroccan left-handers. However, a practical challenge is that <1% of Moroccans appeared to be left-handed (De la Fuente et al, 2015). One possible solution to this problem is to examine right-handers from cultures demonstrating a strong liking for the left.…”

“…It appears that these body-specific associations between valence and left-right space are not even affected by cultural conventions. In one study, reasoning that Arabic culture has stronger conventions in favor of the right and against the left, De la Fuente, Casasanto, Rom an, and Santiago (2015) hypothesized that the body-specificity effect should be more detectable in Moroccan right-handers. Contrary to this prediction, the results showed that implicit space-valence associations in Moroccan participants were indistinguishable from those found in American and European samples.…”