Lawrence Barsalou

University of Glasgow | UofG · Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology

Eustress as a positive response to challenging situations has received increasing attention across diverse literatures, reflecting its potential to improve wellbeing, work performance, and personal growth. In the process, eustress has been defined, measured, and manipulated in myriad ways, leading to fragmentation and vagueness. Because a unified a...

Understanding what facilitates and hinders water drinking is crucial to inform interventions for preventing underhydration. Using the Situated Assessment Method ² , we extended previous research by examining what influences water drinking in daily life. We studied 213 UK adults, assessing 13 potential predictors (e.g. thirst, availability of other...

Measuring trichotillomania is essential for understanding and treating it effectively. Using the Situated Assessment Method (SAM ² ), we developed a psychometric instrument to assess hair pulling in situations where it occurs. In two studies, pullers evaluated their pulling in relevant situations, along with how much they experience factors that po...

Research suggests that a large majority of young people in the UK experience worry and negative emotions about climate change, which affects their functioning in daily life. University students may be particularly likely to experience climate anxiety and worry if, for example, exposed to distressing climate change content in their studies. In a pre...

Climate change increasingly affects mental health and wellbeing. Although recent research has begun to examine climate anxiety, little is known about the situations where it is experienced or situational factors that predict it. To help understand how climate anxiety is experienced in UK residents, we developed and evaluated a situated psychometric...

Water intake is a vital aspect of health, yet a comprehensive theoretical understanding of this behaviour has been lacking, hindering efforts to increase people’s intake. Recent advances in psychology research methodology stress the importance of theory development for understanding and changing behaviour. Specifically, poor theory development prac...

The adverse impacts of underhydration call for a better understanding of what facilitates and hinders water drinking to better inform intervention efforts. We used the Situated Assessment Method, a quantitative approach for profiling behaviours and their underlying influences, to extend previous research on what influences water drinking in daily l...

From the perspectives of grounded, situated, and embodied cognition, we have developed a new approach for assessing individual differences. Because this approach is grounded in two dimensions of situatedness—situational experience and the Situated Action Cycle—we refer to it as the Situated Assessment Method (SAM²). Rather than abstracting over sit...

Trichotillomania (hair pulling disorder) is characterized by the recurrent and repetitive pulling of one’s own hair, often resulting in distress for the individual. Being able to accurately measure trichotillomania is essential for understanding hair pulling and developing interventions to decrease pulling. Most current assessment measures are unsi...

Cross-linguistic differences in concepts have implications for all theories of concepts, not just for grounded ones. Failure to address these implications does not imply the belief that they do not exist. Instead, it reflects a division of labor between researchers who focus on general principles versus cultural variability. Furthermore, core princ...

When attempting to lose weight or adopt a more sustainable diet, most people struggle considerably to permanently change their eating behaviour. To develop novel interventions needed to help participants achieve their goals, it is first necessary to understand what motivates individual consumption. In the present study, we assessed individual consu...

This article examines individual consumption motives and explores their stability across eating situations. Study 1 established an extensive sample of foods consumed in the UK in different eating situations and informed which foods to include in Study 2 and 3. Study 2 evaluated potentially relevant eating motives for food consumption. Using a betwe...

Previous research into drinking behaviour has often focused exclusively on either alcoholic drinks, sugar-sweetened beverages, or water, usually with an emphasis on changing consumption. The primary aim of the present study was to develop and assess a situated framework of drinking behaviour that predicts the frequency of drinking alcoholic as well...

Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g. arm-/leg-related action words). Additionally, motor movements of the hands/feet can have a causal effect on memory maintenance of action words, suggesting that...

Many of the key problems humans are facing today result from desires, habits, and social norms impeding behavior change. Here, we apply a grounded cognition perspective to these phenomena, suggesting that simulating the consequences of one's behaviors plays a key role in them. We first describe the grounded cognition theory of desire and motivated...

Many of the key problems humans are facing today result from desires, habits, and social norms impeding behaviour change. Here, we apply a grounded cognition perspective to these phenomena, suggesting that simulating the consequences of one’s actions plays a key role in them. We first describe the grounded cognition theory of desire and motivated b...

This book addresses the topic of linguistic categorization from a novel perspective. While most of the early research has focused on how linguistic systems reflect some pre-existing ways of categorizing experience, the contributions included in this volume seek to understand how linguistic resources of various nature (prosodic cues, affixes, constr...

From the perspectives of grounded, situated, and embodied cognition, we have developed a new approach for assessing individual differences. Because this approach is grounded in two dimensions of situatedness—situational experience and the Situated Action Cycle—we refer to it as the Situated Assessment Method (SAM2). Rather than abstracting over sit...

Memories acquired incidentally from exposure to food information in the environment may often become active to later affect food preferences. Because conscious use of these memories is not requested or required, these incidental learning effects constitute a form of indirect memory. In an experiment using a novel food preference paradigm (n = 617),...

The ability to differently perceive and represent entities depending on their perspective is crucial for humans. We report five experiments that investigate how the different perspectives adopted while experiencing entities are reflected in conceptualizations (towards vs. away, near vs. far, beside vs. above, inside vs. outside and vision vs. audit...

Higher cognitive functions such as linguistic comprehension must ultimately relate to perceptual systems in the brain, though how and why this forms remains unclear. Different brain networks that mediate perception when hearing have recently been proposed to respect a taxonomic neurobiological model for the processing of different acoustic-semantic...

According to the grounded perspective, cognition emerges from the interaction of classic cognitive processes with the modalities, the body, and the environment. Rather than being an autonomous impenetrable module, cognition incorporates these other domains intrinsically into its operation. The Situated Action Cycle offers one way of understanding h...

How does desire for food and drink arise in the human mind? We suggest that rewarding simulations, which are based on previous experiences, play a key role. In other words, people think about food and drink in terms of what it feels like to consume them, and this leads to desire. We illustrate this with research using behavioral, physiological, and...

Feature listing is a novel method to study people’s rich, multifaceted cognitive representations of food and drink objects. In other words, it helps researchers understand the content activated in memory when people think about foods or drinks. Feature listing is an easy-to-administer method that has traditionally been used to study the semantic fe...

How does desire for food and drink arise in the human mind? We suggest that rewarding simulations, based on previous experiences, play a key role. In other words, people think about food and drink in terms of what it feels like to consume them, and this leads to desire. We illustrate this with research using behavioural, physiological, and neuro-im...

Studies of the classic exteroceptive sensory systems (e.g., vision, touch) consistently demonstrate that vividly imagining a sensory experience of the world—simulating it—is associated with increased activity in the corresponding primary sensory cortex. We hypothesized, analogously, that simulating internal bodily sensations would be associated wit...

When understanding language semantically related to actions, the motor cortex is active and may be sensitive to semantic information, for example about the body-part-relationship of displayed action-related words. Conversely, movements of the hands or feet can impair memory performance for arm- and leg-related action words respectively, suggesting...

From the perspective of the situated conceptualization framework, the primary purpose of concepts is for categorizing and integrating elements of situations to support goal-directed action (including communication and social interaction). To the extent that important situational elements are categorized and integrated properly, effective goal-direc...

Robinson and colleagues (2018) make important first steps in highlighting the shortcomings of laboratory studies of human eating behaviour, and providing some general suggestions to increase methodological and reporting quality. In this commentary, we present additional important theoretical considerations and practical suggestions. First, we discu...

Research in embodied and grounded cognition is defined by the types of hypotheses researchers pursue, with specific emphasis on the ways in which the body, brain, and environment interact to give rise to intelligent behavior. In cognitive neuroscience, it is hypothesized that simulations in modality‐specific representations, situated and embedded i...

From the perspective of constructivist theories, emotion results from learning assemblies of relevant perceptual, cognitive, interoceptive, and motor processes in specific situations. Across emotional experiences over time, learned assemblies of processes accumulate in memory that later underlie emotional experiences in similar situations. A neuroi...

What are the mechanisms by which extrinsic and environmental cues affect consumer experiences, desires, and choices? Based on the recent grounded cognition theory of desire, we argue that consumption and reward simulations constitute a central mechanism in these phenomena. Specifically, we argue that appetitive stimuli, such as specific product cue...

If a theory of concept composition aspires to psychological plausibility, it may first need to address several preliminary issues associated with naturally occurring human concepts: content variability, multiple representational forms, and pragmatic constraints. Not only do these issues constitute a significant challenge for explaining individual c...

Studies have suggested that the default mode network is active during mind wandering, which is often experienced intermittently during sustained attention tasks. Conversely, an anticorrelated task-positive network is thought to subserve various forms of attentional processing. Understanding how these two systems work together is central for underst...

According to constructivist theories of emotion, members of different populations experience emotion differently as a result of assembling different neural resources to produce it. To test this prediction, we sampled individuals from three populations (experienced meditators, cancer survivors, matched controls) and used functional magnetic resonanc...

This study sought to examine the effect of meditation experience on brain networks underlying cognitive actions employed during contemplative practice. In a previous study, we proposed a basic model of naturalistic cognitive fluctuations that occur during the practice of focused attention meditation. This model specifies four intervals in a cogniti...

According to constructivist theories of emotion, members of different populations experience emotion differently as a result of assembling different neural resources to produce it. To test this prediction, we sampled individuals from three populations (experienced meditators, cancer survivors, matched controls) and used functional magnetic resonanc...

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computationa...

The theory of situated conceptualization is introduced, including its core assumptions about the construction and storage of situated conceptualizations, the production of pattern completion inferences in relevant situations, and the implementation of these inferences via multimodal simulation. The broad applicability of the theory to many phenomen...

We propose that the domain general process of categorization contributes to the perception of stress. When a situation contains features associated with stressful experiences, it is categorized as stressful. From the perspective of situated cognition, the features used to categorize experiences as stressful are the features typically true of stress...

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I firs...

We propose that a core eating network and its modulations account for much of what is currently known about the neural activity underlying a wide range of eating phenomena in humans (excluding homeostasis and related phenomena). The core eating network is closely adapted from a network that Kaye, Fudge, and Paulus (2009) proposed to explain the neu...

A brief mindfulness intervention diminished bias in favor of one’s in-group and against one’s out-group. In the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB), individuals expect in-group members to behave positively and out-group members to behave negatively. Consequently, individuals choose abstract language beset with character inferences to describe these ex...

In response to Casasanto, Brookshire, and Ivry (), we address four points: First, we engaged in conceptual replications of Brookshire, Casasanto, and Ivry (), not direct replications. Second, we did not question the validity of Brookshire et al.'s () results, nor the similar findings of other researchers, but instead explained divergent findings wi...

Ruminative thoughts about a stressful event can seem subjectively real, as if the imagined event were happening in the moment. One possibility is that this subjective realism results from simulating the self as engaged in the stressful event (immersion). If so, then the process of decentering-disengaging the self from the event-should reduce the su...

We know less, however, about how desire arises in the first place. What are the actual psychological mechanisms that produce desires and consequently affect our behavior to fulfill them? What neural mechanisms underlie the psychological processes that lead to desire, and that are associated with behaviors such as indulging in tasty food, drinking e...

Mindful attention, a central component of mindfulness meditation, can be conceived as becoming aware of one’s thoughts and experiences and being able to observe them as transient mental events. Here, we present a series of studies demonstrating the effects of applying this metacognitive perspective to one’s spontaneous reward responses when encount...

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects (e.g., processing the spatial feature of up for sky should be faster for up vs. down responses). Growing evidence shows these congruency effe...

The property generation task (i.e. “feature listing”) is often assumed to measure concepts. Typically, researchers assume implicitly that the underlying representation of a concept consists of amodal propositions, and that verbal responses during property generation reveal their conceptual content. The experiments reported here suggest instead that...

The tremendous variability within categories of human emotional experience receives little empirical attention. We hypothesized that atypical instances of emotion categories (e.g. pleasant fear of thrill-seeking) would be processed less efficiently than typical instances of emotion categories (e.g. unpleasant fear of violent threat) in large-scale...

Psychological construction approaches to emotion suggest that emotional experience is situated and dynamic. Fear, for example, is typically studied in a physical danger context (e.g., threatening snake), but in the real world, it often occurs in social contexts, especially those involving social evaluation (e.g., public speaking). Understanding sit...

Research on the "emotional brain" remains centered around the idea that emotions like fear, happiness, and sadness result from specialized and distinct neural circuitry. Accumulating behavioral and physiological evidence suggests, instead, that emotions are grounded in core affect-a person's fluctuating level of pleasant or unpleasant arousal. A ne...

This chapter focuses on the conceptual system to describe the grounded approach. The grounded approach states that cognition relies on different components of the overall environment, which determine and influence human actions. The conceptual system is composed of organized knowledge regarding different aspects of the world. The chapter addresses...

An overview of today's diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to action and the relationship of action and cognition. The emerging field of action science is characterized by a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches that share the basic functional belief that evolution has optimized cognitive systems to serve the demands...

Concepts develop for many aspects of experience, including abstract internal states and abstract social activities that do not refer to concrete entities in the world. The current study assessed the hypothesis that, like concrete concepts, distributed neural patterns of relevant nonlinguistic semantic content represent the meanings of abstract conc...

Grounded theories assume that there is no central module for cognition. According to this view, all cognitive phenomena, including those considered the province of amodal cognition such as reasoning, numeric, and language processing, are ultimately grounded in (and emerge from) a variety of bodily, affective, perceptual, and motor processes. The de...

Aims. While studies on healthy subjects have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits, few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery in stroke patients with hemiparesis. This work is aimed at examining similarities between motor imagery and execution in a group of stroke patients. Materials a...

Three studies illustrate that mindful attention prevents impulses toward attractive food. Participants received a brief mindfulness procedure in which they observed their reactions to external stimuli as transient mental events rather than subjectively real experiences. Participants then applied this procedure to viewing pictures of highly attracti...

This study sought to examine the effect of meditation experience on brain networks underlying cognitive actions employed during contemplative practice. In a previous study, we proposed a basic model of naturalistic cognitive fluctuations that occur during the practice of focused attention meditation. This model specifies four intervals in a cogniti...

People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role fo...

Thechapters in this volume document the importance of COntext aCross diverse literatures, including genetics, neuroscience, perception; action, cognition) emotion, social interaction, and culture.1 SpecificaHy, three dominant themes emerge from this interdisciplinary collection. • Theme 1. Extensive evidence exists fo r context effects. Regard­ les...

Grounded cognition offers a natural approach for integrating Bayesian accounts of optimality with mechanistic accounts of cognition, the brain, the body, the physical environment, and the social environment. The constructs of simulator and situated conceptualization illustrate how Bayesian priors and likelihoods arise naturally in grounded mechanis...

Studies have suggested that the default mode network is active during mind wandering, which is often experienced intermittently during sustained attention tasks. Conversely, an anticorrelated task-positive network is thought to subserve various forms of attentional processing. Understanding how these two systems work together is central for underst...

Embodied theories are increasingly challenging traditional views of cognition by arguing that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences, and processed at this sensorimotor level, rather than being represented and processed abstractly in an amodal conceptual system. Given the established e...

Most studies involving spontaneous fluctuations in the BOLD signal extract connectivity patterns that show relationships between brain areas that are maintained over the length of the scanning session. In this study, however, we examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of the BOLD fluctuations to identify common patterns of propagation within a scan. A...

According to the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion, the situated conceptualization used to construe a situation determines the emotion experienced. A neuroimaging experiment tested two core hypotheses of this theory: (1) different situated conceptualizations produce different forms of the same emotion in different situations, (2) the composition of...

Thirty years ago, grounded cognition had roots in philosophy, perception, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology. During the next twenty years, grounded cognition continued developing in these areas, and also took new forms in robotics, cognitive ecology, cognitive neuroscience, and development...

The ability to draw new conclusions from known facts and hypotheses is central to human thought, enabling syllogistic reasoning, problem solving, causal reasoning, and analogical inference. We review contemporary psychological theories and emerging neuroscience evidence from each domain. Current neuroscience research demonstrates that reasoning is...

In three experiments, participants received nouns or noun phrases for objects and verbally generated their properties (“feature listing”). Several sources of evidence indicated that participants constructed perceptual simulations to generate properties for the noun phrases during conceptual combination. First, the production of object properties fo...

This special issue of Acta Psychologica on "Spatial working memory: From eye movements to grounded cognition" addresses what might, at first blush, appear to be a relatively unusual collection of papers. Some address visuospatial working memory, whereas others address imagery. Some address relatively low-level processes, such as eye movements, wher...

Based on accumulating evidence, simulation appears to be a basic computational mechanism in the brain that supports a broad spectrum of processes from perception to social cognition. Further evidence suggests that simulation is typically situated, with the situated character of experience in the environment being reflected in the situated character...

Three experiments demonstrated that situational information contributes to the categorization of functional object categories, as well as to inferences about these categories. When an object was presented in the context of setting and event information, categorization was more accurate than when the object was presented in isolation. Inferences abo...

This chapter explains that multiple systems represent knowledge. It focuses on two resources of knowledge, believed to have strong empirical support - linguistic forms in the brain's language systems, and situated simulations in the brain's modal systems. Although this chapter focuses on two sources of knowledge, it does not exclude the possibility...

The LASS theory proposes that Language and Situated Simulation both play central roles in conceptual processing. Depending on stimuli and task conditions, different mixtures of language and simulation occur. When a word is processed in a conceptual task, it first activates other linguistic forms, such as word associates. More slowly, the word activ...