The Influence of Spatial Distance Cues on Affect and Evaluation

Current conceptualizations of psychological distance (e.g., construal-level theory) refer to the degree of overlap between the self and some other person, place, or point in time. We propose a complementary view in which perceptual and motor representations of physical distance influence people’s thoughts and feelings without reference to the self, extending research and theory on the effects of distance into domains where construal-level theory is silent. Across four experiments, participants were primed with either spatial closeness or spatial distance by plotting an assigned set of points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. Compared with the closeness prime, the distance prime produced greater enjoyment of media depicting embarrassment (Study 1), less emotional distress from violent media (Study 2), lower estimates of the number of calories in unhealthy food (Study 3), and weaker reports of emotional attachments to family members and hometowns (Study 4). These results support a broader conceptualization of distance-mediated effects on judgment and affect. Can the relative placement of salt and pepper shakers on one’s table influence feelings of emotional attachment to one’s dinner companion? People often look to their environment for clues for how they should feel, as a natural part of the situational appraisal process (e.g., Lazarus, 1991; Trope, 1986). Indeed, those who practice feng shui believe that the placement of objects within a room, and the space between them, can directly affect people’s mental lives (e.g., Darby, 2007). A cluttered room, with insufficient space between objects, is believed to clutter one’s thoughts, whereas a room where there is ordered space between objects is believed to keep one’s thoughts clear. Is this simply mysticism, or can the amount of space between objects genuinely affect people’s judgments and feelings? Informed by theories of embodiment and conceptual development, the present research examined the power of physical-distance cues to moderate people’s emotional experiences. A NEW LOOK AT PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE The main framework of current theorizing about the nature of psychological distance is construal-level theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003). Research guided by this theory indicates that people think about distant events more abstractly and proximal events more concretely (Liberman & Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2003). Recent research has shown construal-level differences associated with various forms of psychological distance, such as social distance inherent in power hierarchies and spatial distance between one’s current and other locations (Fujita, Henderson, Eng, Trope, & Liberman, 2006; Smith & Trope, 2006). When people feel more powerful, they tend to think more abstractly (Smith & Trope, 2006). Similarly, when people think about an event that occurs near where they live, their mental representations of the event are concrete, but when they think about an event that occurs far away, their mental representations of that event are abstract (Fujita et al., 2006). It is important to note that these effects involve the self as a reference point vis-à-vis some other place, person, or point in time. Although construal-level theorists contend that temporal, social, and spatial distance are all contained under the umbrella of ‘‘psychological distance’’ (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, in press; Trope & Liberman, 2003), we argue that spatial distance is not simply a derivative of psychological distance. Indeed, it is very much the other way around. Spatial concepts such as ‘‘nearfar’’ are among the first concepts available to preverbal children (Clark, 1973; Mandler, 1992), being present at 3 to 4 months of age (Leslie, 1982). Spatial relations are easy for infants to parse because the relevant information is readily available to the senses, whereas abstract concepts related to internal states are more difficult to understand (Mandler, 1992). For developing Address correspondence to Lawrence Williams, Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, e-mail: lawrence. [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 302 Volume 19—Number 3 Copyright r 2008 Association for Psychological Science children, analyzing visual displays is much easier than analyzing their own internal states; indeed, accurate introspection is often difficult for adults (e.g., Wilson, 2002). Accordingly, we argue that a primitive understanding of physical distance is the foundation for the later-developed concept of psychological distance, given humans’ ‘‘pervasive tendency to conceptualize the mental world by analogy to the physical world, rather than the other way around’’ (Mandler, 1992, p. 596). Evidence for the metaphoric application of spatial concepts was obtained by Boroditsky (2000), who showed that activating spatial concepts such as ‘‘forward’’ and ‘‘up’’ influenced judgments in the more abstract domain of temporal relations. Further, recent studies in embodied social cognition have shown effects of spatial metaphors on judgments. Judgments of the affective valence of words are facilitated when positive words are presented in the upper half of a computer screen and negative words are presented in the lower half (‘‘up’’ is ‘‘good,’’ ‘‘down’’ is ‘‘bad’’; Meier & Robinson, 2004; see also Clark, 1973). Also, people are more likely to understand two objects as being in a power relationship if they are aligned vertically rather than horizontally (i.e., one’s power over another; Schubert, 2005). These phenomena demonstrate how knowledge about physical relations is projected onto other domains as an analogical means of understanding them, as theorized by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and other researchers (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). If physical-distance concepts are used as the analogical bridge for the development of the concept of psychological distance (Mandler, 1992), then physical distance broadly defined (i.e., not only when the self is the reference point) should influence people’s judgments and affective states. This should be the case because physical-distance cues have adaptive significance, a point that has been argued by major theorists in psychology over the past century. Spatial distance and affect are inextricably linked, because the principle that ‘‘distance equals safety’’ is deeply ingrained in humans’ biological makeup. Both Tolman (1932), in his pioneering work on cognitive maps in animals, and the evolutionary epistemologist Campbell (1956, 1960) suggested that vision itself was an adaptation, enabling safer exploration of the environment at a distance by removing the need for physical contact with unknown, potentially dangerous objects and organisms. And in his classic work on attachment, Bowlby (1969) noted that maintaining specific distance relations is critical for the survival of animals and humans. In particular, he emphasized the adaptive value of the infant keeping close to its mother and monitoring its distance to her at all times in order to gain protection from predators (see also Lorenz, 1962). Finally, recent findings in cognitive neuroscience confirm that sensitivity to physical-distance information is built into the design and function of the human brain, with information processing shifting from forebrain to midbrain regions as a function of the spatial distance between oneself and a looming threat (Mobbs et al., 2007). Our account of the importance of physical-distance information is in harmony with major theories of early concept and social development (e.g., Bowlby, 1969; Clark, 1973; Mandler, 1992). Two important implications follow. First, the activation of spatial representations of physical closeness and distance (i.e., between any two objects, without reference to the self) should influence people’s subjective experiences. Second, the activation of spatial-distance concepts should moderate the emotional impact of subsequent stimuli, because of the adaptive significance of physicaldistance relations between oneself, one’s caretakers, and potential predators. Critically, neither prediction follows from CLT’s treatment of spatial distance. In the studies reported here, we examined the effects of spatial cues on people’s affective responses to and evaluations of emotionally evocative stimuli associated with either potential harm or safety. We hypothesized that participants’ subjective experience will differ depending on whether they perceive relatively close or relatively distant points in Cartesian space. In Studies 1 and 2, we examined the effects of this physical-distance manipulation on responses to embarrassing and violent media. In Study 3, we expanded our investigation by examining the effects of the distance manipulation on judgments concerning potentially dangerous, unhealthy food. Finally, in a stringent test of the power of the physical-distance manipulation, in Study 4, we assessed its effects on participants’ self-reported emotional attachments to significant people and places in their lives.