Grasping the pain: Motor resonance with dangerous affordances Filomena Anelli a,⇑ , Anna M. Borghi a,b,⇑ , Roberto Nicoletti a a Embodied Cognition Lab, University of Bologna, Italy b Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, CNR, Roma, Italy article info Article history: Received 27 February 2012 Available online 5 October 2012 Keywords: Empathy Dangerous objects Motor resonance Affordances abstract Two experiments, one on school-aged children and one on adults, explored the mecha- nisms underlying responses to an image prime (hand vs. control object) followed by grasp- able objects that were, in certain cases, dangerous. Participants were presented with different primes (a male, a female and a robotic grasping-hand; a male and a female sta- tic-hand; a control stimulus) and objects representing two risk levels (neutral and danger- ous). The task required that a natural/artifact categorization task be performed by pressing different keys. In both adults and children graspable objects activated a facilitating motor response, while dangerous objects evoked aversive affordances, generating an interfer- ence-effect. Both children and adults were sensitive to the distinction between biological and non-biological hands, however detailed resonant mechanisms related to the hand- prime gender emerged only in adults. Implications for how the concept of ‘‘dangerous object’’ develops and the relationship between resonant mechanisms and perception of danger are discussed. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In order to survive, humans need to be able to discriminate between objects that pose a potential risk or threat (from now on ‘‘dangerous objects’’) and objects that can be approached without any risk (from now on ‘‘neutral objects’’). Information about an object’s potential risks might conflict with the motor actions that are activated while observing that object. Since Gibson’s seminal paper (1979), many behavioral and neuroscience studies have shown that observing objects, and particularly tools, activates affordances, evoking motor responses. In the last decade research has shed new light on the role played by affordances. Behavioral experiments have shown that objects evoke specific action components (i.e. micro-affor- dance, Ellis & Tucker, 2000), such as a specific grip. For example, when observing an apple or a bottle, participants were facil- itated by having to mimic a power grip rather than a precision one (Tucker & Ellis, 2001). More crucial to our aim here is how studies with a priming paradigm have shown that when the target-object is preceded by a hand prime displaying a congruent grip, categorization responses are facilitated. Borghi et al. (2007) found a compat- ibility effect between the hand prime posture (precision vs. power) and the grip required to grasp the target-object (precision vs. power), in those cases where the experiment was preceded by a motor training phase. Vainio, Symes, Ellis, Tucker, and Ottoboni (2008) replicated and expanded on the experiment by using a dynamic hand prime (i.e., video-clips rather than static images); their results confirmed previous findings. These studies highlighted how motor information emerges when a hand is observed while it is in a position of potential interaction with an object, leading to a facilitation effect (for a review, see Borghi & Cimatti, 2010). 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.09.001 ⇑ Corresponding authors. Addresses: Dipartimento di Discipline della Comunicazione, via Azzo Gardino 23, 40122 Bologna, Italy. Fax: +39 051 2092215 (F. Anelli), Dipartimento di Psicologia, viale Berti Pichat 4, 40127 Bologna, Italy. Fax: +39 051 243086 (A.M. Borghi). E-mail addresses: filomena.anelli@unibo.it (F. Anelli), annamaria.borghi@unibo.it (A.M. Borghi). Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 1627–1639 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog