Browsing by Author "Farias, Ana Rita"
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- Embodiment of abstract categories in space… Grounding or mere compatibility effects? The case of politicsPublication . Farias, Ana Rita; Garrido, Margarida Vaz; Semin, Gün R.In two experiments, the role played by stimulus response compatibility in driving the spatial grounding of abstract concepts is examined. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to classify politics-related words appearing to the left or the right side of a computer monitor as socialist or conservative. Responses were given by pressing vertically aligned keys and thus orthogonal to the spatial information that may have been implied by the words. Responses given by left or right index finger were counterbalanced. In Experiment 2, a lexical decision task, participants categorized political words or non-words presented to the left or the right auditory channels, by pressing the top/bottom button of a response box. The response category labels (word or non-word) were also orthogonal to the spatial information that may have been implied by the stimulus words. In both experiments, responses were faster when socialism-related words were presented on the left and conservatism-related words were presented on the right, irrespective of the reference of the response keys or labels. Overall, our findings suggest that the spatial grounding of abstract concepts (or at least politics-related ones) is independent of experimentally driven stimulus-response compatibility effects.
- “O espaço da política”: Avaliação da conotação política e da valência de uma lista de palavrasPublication . Garrido, Margarida Vaz; Farias, Ana Rita; Palma, TomásNeste artigo, apresentamos um pré-teste de um conjunto de 123 palavras relacionadas com política. Cada palavra foi avaliada por 54 indivíduos no que diz respeito à sua conotação política (esquerda ou direita) e ainda no que diz respeito à sua valência (negativa ou positiva). Os resultados permitiram identificar 47 palavras de esquerda e 29 de direita avaliadas significativamente abaixo e acima do ponto médio da escala, respectivamente, como também 47 palavras relacionadas com política mas avaliadas como neutras (no ponto médio da escala) na dimensão esquerda-direita. Análises posteriores permitem ainda identificar uma lista de 17 palavras de esquerda e de 7 palavras de direita avaliadas de igual modo por respondentes de diferentes orientações políticas. Finalmente a valência destas palavras foi também analisada separadamente para respondentes de esquerda e de direita. A lista de estímulos obtida constitui uma base de trabalho para potenciais estudos quer no campo mais emergente da cognição situada, quer nos domínios já consolidados da psicologia social e da psicologia política.
- Human chemosignals of disgust facilitate food judgmentPublication . Zheng, Yan; You, Yuqi; Farias, Ana Rita; Simon, Jessica; Semin, Gün R.; Smeets, Monique A. M.; Li, WenChoosing food is not a trivial decision that people need to make daily, which is often subject to social influences. Here, we studied a human homolog of social transmission of food preference (STFP) as observed in rodents and other animals via chemosignals of body secretions. Human social chemosignals (sweat) produced during a disgust or neutral state among a group of donors were presented to participants undergoing a 2-alternative-forced-choice food healthiness judgment task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Response speed and two key signal detection indices-d' (discrimination sensitivity) and β (response bias)-converged to indicate that social chemosignals of disgust facilitated food healthiness decisions, in contrast to primary disgust elicitors (disgust odors) that impaired the judgment. fMRI analyses (disgust vs. neutral sweat) revealed that the fusiform face area (FFA), amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) were engaged in processing social chemosignals of disgust during food judgment. Importantly, a double contrast of social signaling across modalities (olfactory vs. visual-facial expressions) indicated that the FFA and OFC exhibited preferential response to social chemosignals of disgust. Together, our findings provide initial evidence for human STFP, where social chemosignals are incorporated into food decisions by engaging social and emotional areas of the brain.