Sitting up straight may lift your mood and sharpen decision-making, study suggests

A new study from McGill University suggests that something as simple as sitting upright could have a modest influence on mood and decision-making. Researchers found that participants encouraged to maintain an upright posture reported more positive emotions.

Sitting up straight may lift your mood and sharpen decision-making

Your sitting posture might just be deciding what your mood is - and how you'll behave and make decisions - according to exciting new research at McGill University. The work builds a case that posture may do more than help your spine; it may even influence your emotions and decision-making.

Published in the British Journal of Psychology, the study showed that participants who were instructed to sit upright had more positive moods than those who were told to sit in a slouched-over posture. As the team explains, while the effect sizes were generally small, they believe the results nonetheless provide further evidence that posture plays an important role in psychological processes, including decision-making behaviours.

The research was led by Professor Jorge Armony of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at McGill University, alongside graduate researcher Soren Wainio-Theberge, who helped to devise the study's original concept.

Designing a more natural experiment

Earlier investigations into the link between body posture and behaviour have been limited by the fact that participants were asked to consciously adopt particular postures - which could distort results by making them aware of what the experimenter was looking for.

Almost 200 volunteers from the university community were initially tested on a computer before being asked to continue using a similar but tablet-sized device. The volunteers were led to believe that they were helping test a mobile app, and not that they were being studied for their posture.

However, the way the tablet was positioned suggested one or the other. One setup asked subjects to sit straight and high so that the device would remain visible, whereas the other setup prompted a more slouched forward position by asking them to place the tablet on a lower desk in front of them.

Because the posture change was induced by the setup rather than requested explicitly, participants were not sure if they followed the right posture. The interviews with the participants revealed that most of them had no idea which trial was the real one.

Better decisions over bigger risks

To test decision-making, the researchers asked test subjects to participate in a computer-generated experiment involving a balloon. The subjects could make the balloon bigger to increase the reward, but every attempt carried a possibility of the balloon exploding, thus emptying their earnings for that round.

The researchers discovered that sitting upright made the subjects choose more profitable options while maintaining a reasonable risk-reward balance. In other words, it appears that being in an upright position does not make one particularly daring; instead, it facilitates a more realistic assessment of potential gains and losses.

The researchers concluded that sitting upright makes one risk-responsible, not impulsive. During the experiment, subjects had to answer questions about their emotions to identify the influence of their emotions on their decisions. The scientists observed that subjects had higher scores for pride, a feeling typically associated with a positive mood. Though the influence was notable, the effect size was small, according to the researchers.

Objective measurements strengthened the findings

One way in which the study is different from the previous examples is that it uses objective measures for posture.

While the first experiment's results were based on the researchers' assumptions about the participants' postures, the second one utilized video analysis software to track the angles of the participants' necks in order to confirm their hypotheses. The video data validated the results of the experiment.

The researchers pointed to the combination of objective posture measures and the blind test as the reason why their study addressed the criticisms of the previous power pose studies.

Practical implications remain modest

The results of the study neither confirm nor deny that sitting up straight can drastically improve the psychological state and decision-making of individuals. The results of the study only prove that posture plays a minor role in the overall scheme of things that affect human mood and behavior.

The researchers believe that the results of their study pose some implications for office layouts and school classrooms, as different furniture and desk arrangements affect the mood and decision-making of humans.

In the present scenario, office environments are designed to ensure that employees are comfortable with standard ergonomic practices. However, the above fact only proves that office designs can have a minuscule but noteworthy impact on the psychological state of humans that ultimately affects their decision-making process. More research is required in these domains to see if such effects are actually prominent outside the labs and how these effects influence humans.

Thus, the results of the study add to the growing body of evidence that the human body plays a significant role in the decision-making processes of humans. Although sitting up straight may not be a solution to all problems, the research study proves that the posture of an individual does make them feel and act differently when facing complex and real-world decisions.

Disclaimer: This article is based on findings from a peer-reviewed study conducted by McGill University and published in the British Journal of Psychology. The findings reflect controlled laboratory conditions, and the observed effects were modest. Further research is needed to determine how these results apply to everyday settings.