Some insults are more difficult to ignore: The embodied insult Stroop effect

Abstract

The primary purpose of the present research was to examine whether bodily (i.e., sensorimotor-derived) knowledge influences processing of insults. We presented more embodied insults (e.g., asswipe), less embodied insults (e.g., cheapskate), and noninsults (e.g., hardwood) in two Stroop tasks. Results from multiple regression analyses showed that (1) there was an insult Stroop effect, in which colour-naming latencies were slower to the insult than to the noninsult stimuli, and (2) bodily experience ratings accounted for a significant amount of unique colour-naming latency variability for insults, even with several other predictor variables (e.g., frequency, offensiveness, imageability) included in the analyses; colour naming was slower for relatively more embodied insults. To determine whether bodily experience effects generalised to noninsult stimuli, we presented high and low body–object interaction (BOI) words in a third Stroop task. In this experiment, BOI did not account for any unique colour-naming latency variability. These results suggest that valence is important to these effects, as bodily knowledge slows responding in the Stroop task only for insults.

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