Embodied cognition is a theory that emphasizes the importance of sensorimotor experiences for cognition. Therefore, the present study focused on how the facial expression manipulation influences the property judgments toward Chinese emotional words. 41 college students were divided into “biting the pen with smile” group and control group to rate the same 26 Chinese emotional words chosen from a Chinese Emotions Corpora (Cho, Chen, and Cheng, 2013). After having the instructed expression, subjects evaluated several semantic dimensions of emotional words immediately. The findings show that the “biting the pen with smile” group has higher rating values for dimension ‘valence’, ‘frequency’ and ‘continuance’ for the ‘disgust’ words, and the dimension ‘valence’ for the ‘angry’ words. The study found that positive facial expression indeed influenced the semantic properties of negative words, not the positive emotional words. The results are useful for investigating how word meaning is built in children and clinical applications.

Theory of Mind (TOM) is an ability to simulate mental activities, attribute intention, and predict behaviors of others. According to Ickes’s study (1990), there are strong correlation between empathy and TOM. However, whether they have any causal-effect relationship is still unclear. It is possible to differentiate the two processes from a developmental perspective since TOM ability develops later than empathy. This study aimed to study the influence of empathy on TOM processes. In the experiment (N=28), 4-year-olds children received a traditional false belief task first; and then after a week, they were divided into two different empathic situations: bullying condition and bully-victim condition. The study found a trend that the TOM score is lower in the bullying condition but higher in the bully-victim condition compared to the baseline condition despite of the insufficient subjects. It suggests that empathic states indeed impact TOM processing.