Iliev Rumen, Smirnova Anastasia
Toyota Research Institute, Los Altos, US.
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, US.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2024 Dec 24;54(1):4. doi: 10.1007/s10936-024-10122-4.
While abstraction is one of the best studied topics in psychology, there is little consensus on its relationship to valence and affect. Some studies have found that abstraction is associated with greater positivity, while other studies have led to the opposite conclusion. In this paper we suggest that a substantial part of this inconsistency can be attributed to the polysemy of the term abstraction. To address this problem, we use a framework developed by Iliev and Axelrod (Journal of psycholinguistic research, 46(3):715-729, 2017), who have proposed that abstraction should not be treated as a unitary construct, but should be split instead in at least two components. Concreteness is based on the proportion of sensory information in a concept, while precision is based on the aggregation of information corresponding to the concept's position in a semantic taxonomy. While both of these components have been used as operationalizations of abstraction, they can have opposite effects on cognitive performance. Using this framework, we hypothesize that when abstraction is defined as a reduction of precision, it will be associated with greater positivity, but when it is defined as lack of concreteness, it will be associated with less positivity. We test these predictions in a novel study and we find empirical support for both hypotheses. These findings advance our understanding of the link between abstraction and valence, and further demonstrate the multi-component structure of abstraction.
虽然抽象是心理学中研究得最为深入的主题之一，但对于它与效价和情感之间的关系，人们却几乎没有达成共识。一些研究发现，抽象与更高的积极性相关，而另一些研究则得出了相反的结论。在本文中，我们认为这种不一致的很大一部分可归因于“抽象”一词的多义性。为了解决这个问题，我们采用了伊利耶夫和阿克塞尔罗德（《心理语言学研究杂志》，46(3):715 - 729，2017）开发的一个框架，他们提出不应将抽象视为一个单一的结构，而应至少拆分为两个成分。具体性基于一个概念中感官信息的比例，而精确性基于与该概念在语义分类法中的位置相对应的信息聚合。虽然这两个成分都被用作抽象的操作化指标，但它们对认知表现可能产生相反的影响。利用这个框架，我们假设，当抽象被定义为精确性的降低时，它将与更高的积极性相关，但当它被定义为缺乏具体性时，它将与较低的积极性相关。我们在一项新的研究中检验了这些预测，并为这两个假设都找到了实证支持。这些发现推进了我们对抽象与效价之间联系的理解，并进一步证明了抽象的多成分结构。
