151 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14341-004 APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology: Vol. 1. Attitudes and Social Cognition, M. Mikulincer and P. R. Shaver (Editors-in-Chief) Copyright © 2015 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. C HAPTER 4 EMBODIMENT OF COGNITION AND EMOTION Piotr Winkielman, Paula Niedenthal, Joseph Wielgosz, Jiska Eelen, and Liam C. Kavanagh In recent years, embodiment theories have become a major conceptual framework for understanding the mind, including the social mind (Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005; Schubert & Semin, 2009). The idea of embodiment theories is that higher level processing is grounded in the organism’s sensory and motor experiences; hence, such frameworks are often called grounded cognition theories (Barsalou, 2008; Wilson, 2002). According to embodiment theories, processing of information about, for example, tools, flavors, melo- dies, driving directions, emotional faces, social and personality characteristics, and even abstract social, moral, emotional, or motivational concepts, along with many other kinds of information, is influenced, informed, associated with, and sometimes depen- dent on perceptual, somatosensory, and motor resources. In this chapter, we illustrate advances in the power of this account of how information pro- cessing works and discuss where new limits and challenges are being revealed. The structure of the chapter is roughly as fol- lows. We begin by contrasting embodiment theories with their main competitors—theories that empha- size the amodal, propositional nature of mental rep- resentations. We then review some evidence for embodied processing in more cognitive domains. We then move on to a detailed description of research on embodied processing’s role in emotional perception and emotional language comprehension, the role of embodied metaphor in understanding interpersonal relations and morality, and the role of mimicry in social judgment. Finally, we discuss the applicability of embodiment theory to understanding and perhaps helping to ameliorate impairments of social functioning, using autism and depression as two illustrative examples. We conclude with the suggestion that a fully fleshed-out embodied account of information processing is still a work in progress. It may in fact be the case that the embodi- ment perspective cannot satisfactorily account for some important aspect of cognition and emotion. Still, the embodiment perspective has proved remarkably generative in terms of both producing new findings and explaining major phenomena and is likely to continue being a major force in psychol- ogy in general and social psychology in particular. THE TRADITIONAL VIEW: AMODAL PROCESSING The human conceptual system supports many cog- nitive operations, from the recognition of a single object to complex decision making. The major mod- els of the conceptual system within cognitive psy- chology have traditionally been associative network models (e.g., Anderson, 1983). According to this view, when perceiving an entity, such as a member of one’s family, information is initially encoded in the brain’s modality systems, such as the visual, auditory, and probably affective systems. The infor- mation is then extracted into an abstract language- like symbol (a proposition) and stored as a node. In the associative network view, the node might be the word brother. This symbol or node is stored in some relation to other information that represent features