“Sit up,” “Fix your posture,” and “Stand tall” are common phrases reiterated by school staff, coaches, and family – all claims suggesting that good posture is good for you. However, when accumulating Journal studies, the “benefits” of posture are more vague than “good posture = good for you” and “bad posture = bad for you.” Each study encapsulates its own nuance and specificity: posture in relation to mood, cognition, motivation, and stress, with subcategories such as how postures are perceived, or how prerequisite conditions of depression change with posture.
Posture vocab
Regarding research on posture, terms like “expansive,” “upright,” and “high-power” each have different definitions but because they capitalize on the same theme, they are used interchangeably when discussing the role of posture, with each word corresponding with the study it was written in. All of the terms above are associated with a “good” posture. The same is true for “bad” posture: terms such as “slouched,” “stooped,” “contractive,” “depressive,” “hunched,” and “defeated” are meant to describe the same thing. This paper collects the most critical points derived from studies and neurochemical analyses of posture, attempting to provide evidence for the viability of posture as a tool to increase mood, cognition, and motivation, and reduce stress.
Mood:
Again and again, studies show that posture is substantial in mood. First, an older study (1993) by S. Stepper and F. Strack from the Department of Psychology at the University of Trier, Germany found that upright postures, as opposed to “a slouched body,” resulted in a more pronounced increase in confidence when the participants received positive feedback on a completed task (the relevancy of this study should not be shunned just because it was concluded in 1993, other studies come to similar conclusions).
Stepper and Strack’s results are supported by a review considering 33 studies published in the Journal of Psychological Science in 2015: expansive, upright postures facilitate increased feelings of power while contractive, slouched postures result in low confidence levels, perceived failure, and depressive thoughts. Moreover, Shwetha Nair and colleagues at the Department of Psychological Medicine and Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland demonstrated that self-esteem, arousal, and mood were increased and fear and “negative word” use decreased. Thus, posture has a direct psychological effect on mood
Cognition:
More data is needed to verify a connection between posture and cognition; however, cognitive speed increased with upright posture. A study from the collaboration of the Department of Educational Psychology and Research at Freidrich-Alexander Unversity in Nuremberg and the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Rensburg, Germany analyzed mood and cognition changes in participants with assigned conditions: upright and stooped. While posture led to an increase in mood and processing speed in cognitive tasks, there was no effect on the accuracy of the cognitive task.
In other words, a cognitive exercise was completed faster, but with no noticeable increase in quality; therefore, an upright posture does not entirely increase all aspects of cognition. However, as pointed out by the study, analytical thinking and problem-solving aspects of cognition are not accounted for by simply measuring processing accuracy. Further studies are needed to confirm a relationship between posture and cognition.
Motivation and stress:
Goal pursuit
Motivation increases with posture, while anxiety and fear decrease. In 1982, a pioneering four-part study published in a psychological and behavioral research report issued in Motivation and Emotion evaluated physical posture in relation to the willingness of subjects to pursue goals, recording the subjects’ attitudes and perceptions. This study is feasible because the methods used and the variables measured are similar to more recent studies. In the abstract, psychologists John Riskind and Carolyn Gotay describe each part of the review: Studies 1 and 2 showed that subjects with temporarily slumped, depressed postures appeared helpless more readily, meaning they started to believe that they could no longer control nor change the situation to perform the task. Consequently, a lack of persistence and motivation followed.
Universal characteristic of decreased confidence
The next studies were less related to motivation but still emphasized the role of posture: Study 3 revealed that individuals with poor, slumped postures were perceived as negative and depressed; Study 4 showed that subjects in a “hunched, threatened” posture reported greater stress than subjects assigned a “relaxed” position. The significance of these two studies is that posture is a universally perceived characteristic and that posture modulates not only mood and confidence but also stress levels.
Neurochemicals
The reason why posture has a direct effect on motivation, mood, and stress lies in the neuroscience of an upright, expansive posture as opposed to a scrunched-up, defeated posture. Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson explains that an upright individual is characterized by high serotonin and low octopamine levels, which results in confidence and power. The inverse – low serotonin, high octopamine levels – produce a drooping posture and fear. In a study, lobsters, which contain the same serotonin systems as humans and most other animals, when exposed to serotonin, stretch themselves out, producing an expansive, upright posture, and a willingness to fight “longer and harder” against other lobsters.
This signifies resilience can be linked with upright posture. Moreover, Peterson depicts that serotonin governs the lobster’s tail-flick reflex – a flight response produced by provocation. This amplifies the relation of posture to motivation and stress. Because a defeated posture increases stress, subjects become easier to startle and scare off. This means that slouched postures are the chemical concoction of fear; changing that neurochemical state by increasing serotonin, thereby activating upright posture, can increase subjective motivation and feelings of confidence and power.
A potential treatment for depression and anxiety
Because of posture’s relation to mood, it may be useful in depression and anxiety treatment. Nair’s study also investigated how posture affects the stress response: slumped individuals used more negative-emotion, sad words and first-person singular pronouns (such as I and me) while reducing positive-emotion words and the total number of words. In the case that slumped postures produce a negative mood, an upright posture can be leveraged by a depressed person because upright postures predicated increased rates of speech, higher self-esteem, more arousal, a better mood, and lower fear. Furthermore, all depressed patients were characterized by a “significantly more slumped posture than” the average person, according to psychological medic Carissa Wilkes and colleagues. Similar improvements in posture led to substantial results of higher arousal, more words, fewer first-person singular pronouns, and lower anxiety.
Use posture
But how can an increased posture benefit the average person? The answer is that sitting upright will increase mood and motivation, placing you into a state of readiness and confidence, (even if it is slight). With this increase in arousal, cognitive speed may increase too, with perceptions of fear and low-self esteem lowering. The limitations are that an innumerable number of variables such as tiredness, fatigue, and health can change the success of posture for a desired outcome; one does not gain psychic cognitive and emotional abilities via sitting up straight. Nevertheless, when needing a quick boost, sit upright, maintain an expansive posture, and assess your arousal and stress – posture is deeply rooted in its neurochemical state.
