Affective polarization of space under imminent physical threat: Self-reported affect, physiology, and social responding across two experiments

When humans navigate through their social and spatial surroundings, they construct affective representations of the spatial context that shape this navigation. The theory of affective judgment in spatial context specifies how people build these representations. We present two laboratory experiments (N = 121 and N = 254) that lend more ecological validity to this line of inquiry. In a modified threat-of-shock paradigm, participants experienced an actual physical threat at one location of an environment depicted on a computer screen. Like in previous online experiments, we observed that, compared to a control condition, participants reported that the threat at this location (termed hotspot, an affectively salient location in space) colored the surroundings negatively with high subjectively perceived arousal at close distance whereas it colored the surroundings positively with low subjectively perceived arousal farther away (i.e., an affective polarization of space). However, this polarization was not mirrored by physiological indices of affect, even though electrodermal and cardiac activity lent support to the idea that participants actually were more threatened closer to the hotspot. Furthermore, we could not find evidence for affective polarization elicited by the threat affecting the affective empathy in response to strangers shown at the different locations. Thus, whereas the subjective experience of affective polarization of space seems robust across different operationalizations, we did not find evidence that this subjective experience is reflected in underlying physiology or that affective empathy is moderated by distance to a threatening location.