Abstract:

In actual social life, people are sometimes unwilling to divulge their true feelings and would rather express opposite affective reactions, a situation in which the embodied affective reactions (affective-related body movement and facial expressions) is inconsistent with their affective evaluations. Examples may include “to force a smile” and “to be undemonstrative as to one’s delight and fury”. The term “affective coherence” refers to this coupling (i.e. consistency) of valence between individual’s embodied affective reactions (such as feelings or other bodily experiences, including approach vs. avoidance behaviors and expressions) and the affective evaluation. This consistency not only concerns whether people’s cognitive evaluation of their emotions is duly expressed in embodied reactions, but also whether these two components are contradictory in valence. Current studies on affective coherence typically employ experimental methods. To manipulate affective coherence entails the manipulation of the two components: the embodied affective reaction and the affective evaluation. Embodied affective reactions can be manipulated by inducing affective feelings (listening to music), performing the affective-related actions (operating near-avoidance actions) or forcing affective expressions (operating facial expressions), and the manipulation of affective evaluation typically employs scrambled sentences task or the subliminal priming task. According to the studies on affective suppression and affective certainty, the suppression of affective expression (affective-related behavior, facial expressions and body movements etc.) would reduce the efficiency of cognitive processing, which may, for example, cause poorer memory performance; in contrast, the agreement between affective feelings and affective belief, engendering affective certainty, may facilitate the cognitive processing, such as resulting in better grades in lexical classification task. On the other hand, studies on conceptual-motor coherence found that the consistency between body movements, such as head-nodding and approach-avoidance behaviors, and affective information can also affect one’s cognitive processing efficiency. Compared with the incoherence condition, a coherence condition may foster better performances in judging affective words and higher sensitivity to words. Based on this, Centerbar et al. (2008) proposed an affective coherence hypothesis, which posited that individuals would experience higher fluency and then have better performance if their embodied affective reactions correspond with their affective evaluations; conversely, individuals would encounter cognitive difficulty and consider themselves trapped in a problem situation inhibitory as to further cognitive processing if their embodied affective reactions collide with cognitive evaluations. This hypothesis has been empirically confirmed in areas as diverse as short-term memory, narrative construction, stereotype and persuasion, which shows that the affective coherence could exercise influences on people’s short-term memory capacity and the cognitive complexity involved in a narrative, and it also influences people’s perception and usage of novel information. However, hitherto tests of the hypothesis have only considered a restricted range of cognitive processes, and have not yet tested the hypothesis in areas such as creative problem-solving. In addition, the primary focus of the hypothesis is on the valence of the emotions while ignoring the potential influence of their arousal and dominance, the other two dimensions of the emotions. The future directions of this field: improving the hypothesis by investigating the unique function of affective coherence vs. incoherence and by integrating the other two dimensions of emotions; formulating a theoretical explanation for affective coherence by integrating the affective-as-information approach, the embodied cognition approach and the affective-as-cognitive-feedback account.