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The present thesis examines embodiment—the body’s influence on psychological processes. Bodily states, perceptions, and actions influence cognitive processes; for example, a heavy backpack makes hills look steeper (Proffitt et al., 2003); and faint odors influence orderliness (Holland, Hendriks, & Aarts, 2005). In Chapter 2, embodiment phenomena are reviewed and classified according to three possible underlying mechanisms. Additionally, empirical tests for distinguishing between the workings of these mechanisms are discussed.
The empirical part of the thesis examines one specific embodiment in more detail, namely embodied cleansing. The basic idea in embodied cleansing is that physical cleansing reduces not only physical but also psychological remnants of the past. For example, Chapter 4 examines whether prosocial behavior after one’s own moral or immoral behavior is changed by embodied cleansing; and Chapter 5 examines how changes in optimism and self-esteem as a result of previous success or failure in an achievement test are reduced by embodied cleansing.
The present thesis examines psychological mechanisms that could explain embodied cleansing. For that, Chapter 3 derives and contrasts two possible explanations for embodied cleansing. Chapter 4 tests the effect of physical cleansing when both explanations make converging predictions (with morally negative memories) compared to when the two explanations make differing predictions (with morally positive memories). However, the results of embodied cleansing on prosocial behavior after (im)moral recall could not be examined as (im)moral recall, against expectations, did not influence prosocial behavior in the present paradigm.
Chapter 5 more closely examines one of the two explanations. For that, different aspects of the act of cleaning one’s hands are varied to examine necessary and sufficient criteria for embodied cleansing. The results show that deliberate cleaning is essential for embodied cleansing; additionally the cleaning action has to refer to one’s own body (and not to an object). Thus, a combination of inferential and automatic processes seem to play a role in embodied cleansing. Finally the results are discussed in relation to other embodiment effects and explanations.
„Perspective-taking“ is the ability to put yourself into the place of somebody else. Psychological research distinguishes three kinds of perspective-taking, namely, perceptual (visuo-spatial), affective (empathy), and cognitive (theory of mind) perspective-taking. The last two kinds of perspective-taking are often summarized as “psychological perspective-taking”. This dissertation tackles the question of whether these three kinds of perspective-taking should be conceptualized as independent constructs or as facets of one and the same construct.
Prior research findings concerning this are equivocal. While some authors consider correlations between the different kinds of perspective-taking as too low for a unitary construct, others interpret correlations of the same magnitude as evidence for this. A less arbitrary way of deciding this would be to identify common mechanisms that underlie all kinds of perspective-taking and to examine whether manipulating these mechanisms in psychological experiments affects measures of perceptual, affective, and cognitive perspective-taking in parallel.
In accordance with this reasoning, the present dissertation assumes that the mental self-rotation of the body schema into the physical location of another person, the main mechanism of perceptual perspective-taking, is a common mechanism of all kinds of perspective-taking. Thus, contrary to previous research a unitary construct is not only justified on the grounds of a common central functionality of all kinds of perspective-taking, that is, overcoming one’s egocentrism in favor of an alternative (perceptual, affective or cognitive) point of view, but additionally on the grounds of a common psychological mechanism. From this, the simple hypothesis that inducing visuo-spatial perspective-taking also leads to psychological consequences is derived. This hypothesis was tested in 6 experiments.
In these experiments, participants first had to adopt the visual perspective of another person. To this end, they saw a person sitting at a table with two objects. During every trial, participants had to decide which hand the person would have to use in order to grab one of the two objects. Furthermore, the angular disparity between the participant and the target was manipulated in such a way that during half of the trials the target person was within the same visuo-spatial reference frame as the participant and thus no perspective-taking was necessary to solve the task correctly. During the remaining trials, the target person was sitting in another visuo-spatial reference frame so that the participants had to engage in perspective-taking to solve the task correctly. After every such trial, the target person was imbued with a mental state. This was done using an adapted paradigm for the investigation of the anchoring heuristic. Specifically, participants were asked to answer a trivia question and also saw what the target person from the visuo-spatial perspective-taking task was guessing.
In line with the hypothesis that visuo-spatial perspective-taking leads to psychological outcomes, too, it was found that participants adopted the thoughts of the target person more strongly after visuo-spatial perspective-taking. This was evident in the absolute size of the anchoring effect, as well as the differences between participant and target estimations. Further experiments ruled out sample and stimulus characteristics and task difficulty as alternative explanations for these effects. The last two experiments furthermore established that the effects were specific to constellations where an embodied self-rotation into the target’s perspective was necessary and that the adoption of the target’s thoughts was associated with feelings of similarity.
Taken together, these findings support the theoretically elaborated unitary view of perspective-taking and furthermore distinguish this construct from other related phenomena. In the general discussion, the significance of these findings for research on empathy, theory of mind, and perspective-taking, as well as practical implications are discussed.