Strong versus weak embodiment: Spatial iconicity in physical, abstract, and social semantic categories.

BACKGROUND: Perceptual and action systems seem to be related to complex cognitive processes, but the scope of grounded or embodied cognition has been questioned. Zwaan and Yaxley (2003) proposed that cognitive processes of making semantic relatedness judgments can be facilitated when word pairs are presented in ways that their referents maintain their iconic configuration rather than their reverse-iconic configuration (the spatial iconicity effect). This effect has been observed in different semantic categories using specific experiments, but it is known that embodiment is highly dependent on task demands. METHOD: The present study analyzed the spatial iconicity effect in three semantic categories (physical, abstract, and social) using the same experimental criteria to determine the scope of embodied cognition. In this reaction-time experiment, 75 participants judged the semantic relatedness of 384 word pairs whose experimental items were presented in their iconic or reverse-iconic configurations. RESULTS: Two mixed-effects models with crossed random effects revealed that the interaction between word meaning and spatial position was present only for physical concepts but neither for abstract nor social concepts. CONCLUSIONS: Within the framework of strong and weak embodiment theories, the data support weak embodiment theory as the most explicative one.

Profiling Children Sexual Abuse in a Sample of University Students: A Study on Characteristic of Victims, Abusers, and Abuse Episodes.

Because of its prevalence and its potential negative consequences, child sexual abuse (CSA) is a public health problem in every country in the world. Knowledge of the characteristics of abuse episodes (victim, abuser, relationship between them, type of sexual contact, duration, threat and/or use of force) is essential to specify the contents of intervention programs for the detection and reduction of the negative consequences of CSA. Starting with an initial sample of 1605 university students of both sexes (70.9% women, 29.1% men), aged between 18 and 26 years (M = 21.1, SD = 2.2), 90 participants who had suffered an episode of CSA up to age 16 were selected (84.4% women, 15.6% men; Mage = 21.1, SD = 2.2). It was found that: (1) there was a higher prevalence of CSA among women and that the victims' average age when they suffered abuse was around 11 years; (2) the abusers were mostly male, close to the victims, and with an average of slightly less than 30 years; and (3) there was a significant proportion (25.6%) of CSA cases with penetration and in which force was used or threatened. These results are relevant, as they show that there is still a noteworthy prevalence of CSA cases on university campuses that needs to be addressed. Knowing the characteristics of these episodes is critical to implementing more effective interventions.

Selective attention to question-relevant text information precedes high-quality summaries: Evidence from eye movements.

Comprehension and summarizing are closely related. As more strategic and selective processing during reading should be reflected in higher quality of summaries, the aim of this study was to use eye movement patterns to analyze how readers who produce good quality summaries process texts. 40 undergraduate students were instructed to read six expository texts in order to respond a causal question introduced in the end of the first paragraph. After reading, participants produced an oral summary of the text. Based on the quality of the summaries, participants were divided into three groups: High, Medium and Low Quality Summaries. The results revealed that readers who produced High Quality Summaries made significantly more and longer fixations and regressions in the question-relevant parts of texts when compared to the other two summary groups. These results suggest that the summary task performance could be a good predictor of the reading strategies utilized during reading.