Grounding meaning in social and emotional experience: Challenges and opportunities

Within the broader debate on how the mind and brain represent meaning, multiple representation theories have positioned social and emotional experience, along with their underlying neural systems, as key sources for concept grounding. In this article, I review the current evidence for this proposal and discuss several conceptual and methodological challenges, including the limited capacity of behavioral evidence to support this view, the difficulties associated with interpreting neuroimaging findings, the need for stronger causal evidence, and the importance of adopting open science practices. I argue that these limitations converge on a common concern: in their current form, many findings taken to support multiple representation theories of socio-affective grounding do not provide sufficiently diagnostic evidence to empirically adjudicate between them and competing accounts of semantic representation. In response, I outline a set of methodological recommendations and underexplored ideas that may help refine the theoretical framework, generate more decisive tests, and guide future research.