| Description |
In recent years, the idea that a bidirectional relation exists between physiological and psychological processes has become widely accepted (Barsalou, 2010; Glenberg et al., 2009). The current data show that emotions are inextricably linked to the body, and that an inherent part of having an emotional experience is having a physiological reaction. From the perspective of the embodied cognition literature the subsequent recall of an event entails at least a partial reconstruction of the sensory experience that occurred at the time of the original experience. Given this, it seems intuitively reasonable that people’s narratives about emotional experiences should reflect people’s physical experiences through the use of embodied language. In this study (n = 49) I examined three questions: 1) when, how, and to what extent is the body represented in narratives about everyday emotional experiences? 2) Is arousal, both self-reported and physiologically measured, when initially recalling an emotional memory associated with aspects of how the body is represented in a narrative about that memory? And, 3) does the use of embodied language in a narrative about an emotional memory change physiological responding to that memory after narration? In considering these questions I found that while the vast majority of people use embodied language when narrating about a past emotional event, both the amount and type of embodied language used varied dependent upon gender, self-reported levels of arousal and autonomic nervous system arousal. Specifically, the pattern of embodied narration appears to take two distinct pathways. For women a nice adaptive pattern emerges of higher levels of self-reported anger leading to more embodied language use, which leads to lower self-reported and sympathetic nervous system arousal. For men, this pattern was not clear, indicating that relation between embodied language use and gender is more complex than originally thought. |
