Does the body shape emotion?

Introduction: Researchers tested whether moving the face into the position of an expression changes how people feel.

Participants: Ninety-six students (58 women and 38 men) aged 18 to 25 at a university in the Netherlands took part for course credit. Race/ethnicity was not reported.

Method: Participants were told the study was about how muscle positions affect attention. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups. In the cheek-raise group, they were told to lift their cheeks and pull the corners of their mouth back toward their ears, which creates a smile without using the word "smile". In the lip-push group, they were told to push their lips forward and draw their eyebrows together, which creates a frown-like expression. In the relaxed group, they kept their face relaxed. While holding the position, each participant rated how funny 10 cartoons were (0 = not at all funny, 10 = extremely funny). Eleven participants who guessed the purpose of the study were left out of the analysis.

Results and Discussion: The cheek-raise group rated the cartoons as funnier (mean of 6.2) than the relaxed group (5.6) and the lip-push group (5.1). The differences were statistically significant but small; for example, the effect size for cheek-raise versus relaxed was 0.25. The researchers noted that other laboratories have sometimes found smaller effects or none at all.

Introduction: The spinal cord carries messages between the brain and the rest of the body. Researchers asked whether people who receive less feedback from their bodies, because of a spinal cord injury, feel emotions less strongly.

Participants: Sixty adults aged 24 to 58 (44 men and 16 women) with a complete spinal cord injury at least two years earlier, recruited from rehabilitation centers in the United States, and 60 adults without an injury matched on age and gender. In 30 of the injured participants, the injury was in the neck, so they had almost no sensation from the body below the shoulders. In the other 30, the injury was lower in the back, so they still had sensation from the chest and stomach. Race/ethnicity was not reported.

Method: Each participant described a recent situation in which they had felt joy, anger and fear, and rated how intensely they felt each emotion at the time (0 = not at all, 10 = as intensely as I have ever felt it). Interviewers wrote down how the participants described the experience.

Results and Discussion: Ratings of joy and anger were similar in all three groups (joy means: neck injury 7.6, lower injury 7.9, no injury 8.0; anger means: 6.8, 7.0 and 7.1). Fear ratings were lower for people with neck injuries (5.9) than for people with lower injuries (7.0) or no injury (7.4), a statistically significant difference. Several people with neck injuries said that fear now felt "more like a thought than a feeling in my gut."

Introduction: Researchers tested whether a racing heart makes people feel more angry, and whether it matters what people think caused it.

Participants: Eighty students (42 women and 38 men) aged 18 to 23 at a university in Canada took part for course credit. Race/ethnicity was not reported.

Method: Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Two groups stepped up and down on a low platform for 2 minutes, which raised their heart rate; one of these groups was told, "This exercise may leave your heart racing for a few minutes," and the other was told nothing about the exercise's effects. The third group sat quietly for 2 minutes. Three minutes later, while the exercise groups' heart rates were still raised, every participant received a rude written message, supposedly from another participant, criticizing an essay they had written earlier. Participants then rated how angry they felt (0 = not at all, 10 = extremely). Afterward, everyone was told the message was written by the researchers.

Results and Discussion: The exercise group that was told nothing rated their anger at a mean of 6.8, higher than the exercise group that was told about the racing heart (4.6) and the group that sat quietly (4.4). The difference between the two exercise groups was statistically significant, but the told-about-it group and the sitting group did not differ significantly.