Cultures two routes to embodiment. A commentary

Comments on an article by Dov Cohen and Angela K.Y Leung (see record 2009-23823-030). The central argument of Cohen and Leung's article on The hard embodiment of culture is that cultures also differ systematically with respect to the body comportments or postures they impose or encourage and that this will, in turn, affect the way people feel and think. Although this prediction may sound familiar to people acquainted with cross-cultural work on nonverbal behavior, this is, in my view, an important, currently under-researched, aspect of embodiment. The main argument of the authors is that such culture-specific forms of embodiment will affect complex representations and that they will do so through two distinct routes: pre-wired versus totem embodiments. I will briefly comment each of these points, by establishing links with previous areas of research, identifying open problems, and delineating possible future developments. Throughout this brief comment I have purposefully focused on the unidirectional effect of embodiment on cognitive representations rather than vice versa. According to most embodiment approaches, the link between body and mind should be conceived as bidirectional such that bodily actions not only activate complex representations, but also vice versa, feeding into a self-reinforcing cycle. More than any other area of psychological research it would therefore be desirable to develop feedback models that do justice to the bidirectional link between body and mind.