Reach For What You Like: The Body's Role in Shaping Preferences

Abstract

People often make judgments about the valence, pleasantness, or likeability of objects and other stimuli they encounter. These judgments can occur even before a stimulus is processed for meaning (Zajonc, 1980). But, what drives people's judgments of how much they like an object or how pleasant they deem it to be? Preferences for one object over another have been shown to be based on perceptual features such as symmetry, high figure-ground contrast, object size, and typicality. Moreover, previous experience interacting with an object can increase the perceptual ease or fluency of processing it, which in turn increases positive affect towards the item in question (for a review, see Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004).In the current work we review and introduce evidence that preference and valence judgments about stimuli in one's environment are also driven, at least in part, by the motor system.We begin by turning to research showing that the active bodyby way of specific facial expressions, head movements, and approach-avoidance arm movements-impacts individuals' valence and preference judgments of both valenced (i.e., with an inherent emotional content) and non-valenced stimuli. We then introduce evidence that, even when a person is not moving or has no explicit intention to act, the motor system can drive preferences for objects in one's environment.Before we begin, it is important to be explicit about what we mean by terms such as preference and how they are connected to related terms such as emotion. This will not only help you, the reader, to understand where we, the authors, are coming from, but it will help to clarify how we use these terms in relation to other articles in this special section. In our view, an individual's preference for a particular stimulus, or how much a AbstractThe position of individuals' bodies (e.g., holding a pencil in the mouth in a way that either facilitates or inhibits smiling musculature) can influence their emotional reactions to the stimuli they encounter, and can even impact their explicit preferences for one item over another. In this article we begin by reviewing the literature demonstrating these effects, explore mechanisms to explain this body-preference link, and introduce new work from our lab that asks whether one's bodily or motor experiences might also shape preferences in situations where the body is not contorted in a particular position, or when there is no intention to act. Such work suggests that one consequence of perceiving an object is the automatic and covert motor simulation of acting on this object. This, in turn, provides individuals with information about how easy or hard this action would be. It transpires that we like to do what is easy, and we also prefer objects that are easier to act on. The notion that judgments of object likeability are driven by motoric information furthers embodied cognition theories by demonstrating that even our preferences are grounded in action.

Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces

“…As such, these models are consonant with theories of embodied cognition, which emphasize the utilization of body representations in a variety of behaviors from memory to attitude formation (Barsalou, Kyle Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003;Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005;Ping, Dhillon, and Beilock, 2009;Crawford, 2009), as well as with perception-action models of movement perception and imitation (Prinz, 1997). Simulation models can be contrasted with their logical alternative: one might imagine that emotion recognition is possible by a learned rule-based system whereby configurations of facial features, vocal prosody patterns, and body gestures, postures, or movements come to be associated with knowledge acquired about the associated experience through other, perhaps verbal, means.…”

Situated Embodied Cognition: Monitoring Orientation Cues Affects Product Evaluation and Choice

“…This phenomenon can be referred to as embodied cognitive fluency (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009) or motor fluency (Ping et al, 2009), because the feeling of ease results from bodily feedback, or more particularly motor behavior. Beilock and Holt (2007) were the first to show this effect.…”

A word in the hand: action, gesture and mental representation in humans and non-human primates

“…These studies suggest that the neural systems involved in action production influence the neural systems involved in action perception; specifically, having previous experience performing an action is correlated with activation of sensorimotor brain regions when observing that action. Previous motor experience also influences memories of items or objects that we have encountered in the past and the degree to which we like the objects in question [8,14,15].…”