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Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions

It has long been recognized that humans tend to anthropomorphize. That is, we naturally and effortlessly interpret the behaviors of nonhuman agents in the same way we interpret human behaviors. This tendency has only recently become a subject of empirical research. Most of this work uses explicit me...

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Autores principales: Dacey, Mike, Coane, Jennifer H.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361065/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37484094
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149444
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author Dacey, Mike
Coane, Jennifer H.
author_facet Dacey, Mike
Coane, Jennifer H.
author_sort Dacey, Mike
collection PubMed
description It has long been recognized that humans tend to anthropomorphize. That is, we naturally and effortlessly interpret the behaviors of nonhuman agents in the same way we interpret human behaviors. This tendency has only recently become a subject of empirical research. Most of this work uses explicit measures. Participants are asked whether they attribute some human-like trait to a nonhuman agent on some scale. These measures, however, have two limitations. First, they do not capture automatic components of anthropomorphism. Second, they generally only track one anthropomorphic result: the attribution (or non-attribution) of a particular trait. However, anthropomorphism can affect how we interpret animal behavior in other ways as well. For example, the grin of a nonhuman primate often looks to us like a smile, but it actually signals a state more like fear or anxiety. In the present work, we tested for implicit components of anthropomorphism based on an affective priming paradigm. Previous work suggests that priming with human faces displaying emotional expressions facilitated categorization of words into congruent emotion categories. In Experiments 1–3, we primed participants with images of nonhuman animals that appear to express happy or sad emotions, and asked participants to categorize words as positive or negative. Experiment 4 used human faces as control. Overall, we found consistent priming congruency effects in accuracy but not response time. These appeared to be more robust in older adults. They also appear to emerge with more processing time, and the pattern was the same with human as with primate faces. This demonstrates a role for automatic processes of emotion recognition in anthropomorphism. It also provides a potential measure for further exploration of implicit anthropomorphism.
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spelling pubmed-103610652023-07-22 Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions Dacey, Mike Coane, Jennifer H. Front Psychol Psychology It has long been recognized that humans tend to anthropomorphize. That is, we naturally and effortlessly interpret the behaviors of nonhuman agents in the same way we interpret human behaviors. This tendency has only recently become a subject of empirical research. Most of this work uses explicit measures. Participants are asked whether they attribute some human-like trait to a nonhuman agent on some scale. These measures, however, have two limitations. First, they do not capture automatic components of anthropomorphism. Second, they generally only track one anthropomorphic result: the attribution (or non-attribution) of a particular trait. However, anthropomorphism can affect how we interpret animal behavior in other ways as well. For example, the grin of a nonhuman primate often looks to us like a smile, but it actually signals a state more like fear or anxiety. In the present work, we tested for implicit components of anthropomorphism based on an affective priming paradigm. Previous work suggests that priming with human faces displaying emotional expressions facilitated categorization of words into congruent emotion categories. In Experiments 1–3, we primed participants with images of nonhuman animals that appear to express happy or sad emotions, and asked participants to categorize words as positive or negative. Experiment 4 used human faces as control. Overall, we found consistent priming congruency effects in accuracy but not response time. These appeared to be more robust in older adults. They also appear to emerge with more processing time, and the pattern was the same with human as with primate faces. This demonstrates a role for automatic processes of emotion recognition in anthropomorphism. It also provides a potential measure for further exploration of implicit anthropomorphism. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-07-07 /pmc/articles/PMC10361065/ /pubmed/37484094 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149444 Text en Copyright © 2023 Dacey and Coane. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Dacey, Mike
Coane, Jennifer H.
Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
title Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
title_full Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
title_fullStr Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
title_full_unstemmed Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
title_short Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
title_sort implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10361065/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37484094
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149444
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