Let Me Make You Happy, And I’ll Tell You How you look around: Using an Approach-Avoidance Task as an Embodied Emotion Prime in a Free-Viewing Task

Abstract

The embodied approach of human cognition suggests that concepts are deeply dependent upon and constrained by an agent’s physical body’s characteristics, such as performed body movements. In this study, we attempted to broaden previous research on emotional priming investigating the interaction of emotions and visual exploration. We used the joystick-based approach-avoidance task to influence the emotional states of participants, and subsequently, we presented pictures of news web pages on a computer screen and measured participant’s eye movements. As a result, the number of fixations on images increased, the total dwell time increased, and the average saccade length from outside of the images towards the images decreased after the bodily congruent priming phase. The combination of these effects suggests increased attention to web pages’ image content after the participants performed bodily congruent actions in the priming phase. Thus, congruent bodily interaction with images in the priming phase fosters visual interaction in the subsequent exploration phase.

Evidence for the Embodiment of the automatic approach bias

“…1997). For reasons of comparability we used a stimulus set identical to one being used by other studies and being accessible for other researchers (Kaspar et al 2015;Czeszumski et al 2020). Half of the images had a valence rated below 3 (IAPS scale) and served as negative stimuli.…”

“…In line with prior research (e.g. Czeszumski et al 2020), we used a "zooming-effect" to enhance the impression of a movement of approach or avoidance, respectively. While moving the joystick or when pressing the button on the response pad for the third time, the image changed in size in a way that was supposed to enhance the impression of approach or avoidance.…”

“…Conversely, in approach conditions (pull joystick; press the 'down button on the response pad) the image presented smoothly increased in size (Figure 2). This zoom feature of the approach-avoidance tasks was programmed in MATLAB's Psychtoolbox V3 (r2017a; MathWorks Company) and taken directly from (Czeszumski et al 2020) with only few adjustments made in the code. Participants were instructed to push or pull the joystick to its limit.…”