Santiago, J. 1 , Márquez, J. 1 & Valenzuela, J. 2
1 ept. De Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, Spain.
2 Dept. de Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Murcia, Spain.
When we talk about people, we often resource to tactile words. A person may be “tender”, “rough”, “warm” or “pressing”. Are these just dead metaphors, or do we actually activate tactile concepts when processing person concepts? In the present work, we focus on the mappings between the tactile perceptions of “tough” versus “tender”, on one hand, and “rough” versus “smooth”, on the other hand, and their corresponding personality concepts.
Participants were shown a set of pictures of candidates to be included in a trial jury. In one condition, the jury was going to judge a bad person who had harmed a relative of the participant. In another condition, the person being judged was the participant himself/herself. The task was to accept or reject each candidate by closing a pair of pliers (in one experiment) or moving a joystick (in another experiment). In the first experiment, the pliers required greater physical effort to be closed (tough condition) or very little effort (tender condition). In the second experiment, the joystick was covered with sand paper (rough condition) or with a very smooth hairy cloth (smooth condition).
The results showed that an irrelevant tactile sensation is able to influence acceptance rates of jury members. Both the tough and rough conditions led to a lower acceptance rate when the jury members were to judge oneself and a greater rate when they were to judge the bad person. Tender or smooth sensations induced an opposite pattern. These results show that it is not just the acceptance response which is associated to tactile sensations, but that touch influences social impressions. Aspects of the results also suggest that the sex of the jury member and the participant are important modulating factors.