The Flexible Role of Social Experience in the Processing of Abstract Concepts

Multiple representation theories propose that social experience plays an important role in grounding abstract concepts. However, it is less clear how social experience influences the processing of abstract concepts, especially whether this influence is modulated by emotional experience and task demands. To address this question, we orthogonally manipulated the socialness (high vs. low) and emotional valence (positive vs. negative vs. neutral) of abstract words in a lexical decision task (LDT, Experiment 1) and an emotional Stroop task (Experiment 2). Results show that the role of socialness in abstract concept processing was modulated by the concept's emotional valence, with different patterns between the two tasks. Specifically, positive high-socialness (HS) words elicited slower responses than positive low-socialness (LS) words in the emotional Stroop task, but no such difference was observed in the LDT. In both tasks, however, faster responses were found for negative HS than for negative LS words, and no response differences were observed for neutral HS and LS words. These results provide behavioral evidence for the importance of social experience in the processing of abstract concepts and suggest that concept knowledge derived from social experiences interacts with concept knowledge derived from emotional experiences during lexical-semantic processing. This finding clarifies the heterogeneity of abstract concepts, with positive and negative social words constituting distinct subcategories, and confirms experience-based abstract concepts are inherently flexible, selectively combining with other associated embodied experiences based on task demands, thereby dynamically influencing abstract concept processing.