Catherine Reed: Claremont-McKenna College Department of Psychology

Social psychologists have embraced the tenants of embodied cognition to explain how we understand the emotions of others. They claim that the reinstantiation of previous sensorimotor experience during emotional and social information processing is an essential process for understanding others’ emotions (e.g., Neidenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005). In this talk I suggest that current models of embodied emotion are missing the necessary body-processing mechanisms from which the simulations of emotional experience operate. Further, if one cannot create the basic correspondences between another person’s body and one’s own then one cannot engage in the appropriate simulation process which can lead to social-emotional deficits such as those observed in autism spectrum disorders.