ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Embodied grounding of abstract concepts: an image-based comparative analysis of sensorimotor and emotional experiences in Chinese.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Specificity effect in concrete/abstract semantic categorization task.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Emotional and Social Dimension of Abstract Concepts Meet with Interoception in Right Anterior Insula.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Interoceptive grounding of conceptual knowledge: new insight from an interoceptive-exteroceptive categorization task of concepts.Psychological research · 2026Article
- A multimodal transformer-based tool for automatic generation of concreteness ratings across languages.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Invariant representations in abstract concept grounding - the physical world in grounded cognition.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Editorial concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Words hurt: common and distinct neural substrates underlying nociceptive and semantic pain.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
How are abstract concepts such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' represented in the mind? One prominent proposal suggests that abstract concepts are grounded in emotion. Supporting this 'affective embodiment' account, abstract concepts are rated to be more strongly positive or more strongly negative than concrete concepts. This paper demonstrates that this finding generalizes across languages by synthesizing rating data from Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish and Spanish. However, a deeper look at the same data suggests that the idea of emotional grounding only characterizes a small subset of abstract concepts. Moreover, when the concreteness/abstractness dimension is not operationalized using concreteness ratings, it is actually found that concrete concepts are rated as more emotional than abstract ones. Altogether, these results suggest limitations to the idea that emotion is an important factor in the grounding of abstract concepts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.