The impact of slumped versus upright posture on emotions and stress responses

Abstract

Previous research has established that changes in posture appear to induce emotional states and influence how affective information is processed. It has been shown that people who adopt an emotion-specific posture experience the emotion, show behaviour congruent to the emotion, or show emotion-specific changes in autonomic nervous and cardiac system activity. The present study manipulated posture (slumped versus upright) to test its effects on emotions and physiological outcomes. The novel contributions of this study were the use of implicit measures as well as self-report measures to identify any changes in mood and the use of a stress task during these specific postures. Seventy-four healthy participants were initially instructed to complete questionnaires assessing their mood and self-esteem before being randomly assigned to one of two conditions. These were a slumped seated posture (bowed head, rounded shoulders and a stooped back) or an upright-seated posture (elevated head, straight shoulders and an erect back). After group allocation, all participants (from either condition) were put through a reading and speech task, which was followed by the completion of a set of questionnaires assessing mood, self-esteem, perceptions of probability, degrees of fear and levels of perceived control in threat scenarios. The speeches delivered by the participants were transcribed and analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to detect any differences in word use between the groups (implicit emotion measure). Results showed that the upright condition reported more positive emotions (higher self-esteem, higher levels of arousal and better mood) compared to participants in the slumped condition. Furthermore, participants in the upright condition spoke more and read more words compared to the slumped condition. Results also revealed that the slumped condition reported more fear in social threat situations compared to the upright condition. The LIWC analysis revealed that the slumped participants used more negative emotion words, first-person singular pronouns, words reflecting affective processes and sadness, whilst the upright participants reported higher usage of positive emotion words and a higher word count. Physiologically, there were significant differences in pulse pressure between each condition with the upright group having higher pulse pressure during the stress task but no significant differences were observed in heart rate. Overall, the findings suggest that adopting an upright versus a slumped posture can improve emotional outcomes and alter blood pressure. These results may have implications for improving mental health. Future research could investigate whether a depressed individual could feel better by adopting a more upright posture.