Effect of Height on Peoples Body Specific Representation and Association between Valence and Space

Abstract

The body-specificity hypothesis proposes that people with different kinds of bodies tend to think differently in predictable ways (Casasanto, 2009). Previous researches have shown that people tend to make a good judgment on things on the side of their dominant hand which experiences greater motor fluency, and bad judgment on their nondominant side. This conceptual mapping has been shown to be flexible: changing the relative fluency of the hands, or even observing a change in someone else’s motor fluency, results in a reversal of the mapping, such that good things become associated with the side of the nondominant hand (Casasanto & Chrysikou, 2011). The present study consistently tests the body-specificity hypothesis in using people’s height as a test bed. In Casasanto (2009) study, it is shown that about 90% of participants relate “up” with “good”. Is there any different pattern of the association between space and valence among tall and short people? In the present study, we assume that taller people are more likely to make eyes look down and shorter people are more likely to look upward, and the “up is good” effect has interaction with people’s height, which means heights moderate the overall association of good with up. The pre-test is to confirm the premise that taller people feel more comfortable looking down and shorter people feel more comfortable looking up. The experiments are testing whether the association of good with up is weaker in tall people and stronger in tall people. The significant effect is expected to support the body-specificity theory.