Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany.
Scand J Psychol. 2024 Oct;65(5):966-979. doi: 10.1111/sjop.13046. Epub 2024 Jun 14.
The present study investigated the effects of expansive and contractive body displays on adaptive behavior and affective outcomes. Addressing limitations in past research, the effects were investigated in two different contexts (i.e., fear context and sadness context), compared with two types of control conditions and the moderating effects of motivational traits and symptoms of psychopathology were accounted for. A sample of 186 adults completed a fear experiment involving a mock job interview and a sadness experiment involving sad mood induction. For each experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of four body manipulations: (1) expansive; (2) contractive; (3) active control (i.e., running in place); or 4) passive control (i.e., doing nothing). The primary outcome was adaptive behavior (i.e., appropriate job-interview behavior and positive recall bias). Secondary affective outcomes were emotions, action tendencies, and appraisals. Results revealed small, non-significant effects of body displays on primary outcomes (ds = 0.19-0.28). For secondary outcomes, significant effects were identified for positive emotions (ds = 0.33). Across secondary outcomes, pairwise comparisons revealed that expansive displays led to more favorable outcomes than contractive displays. For participants with the highest levels of depression, body display conditions led to less favorable affective outcomes than control conditions. The results suggest that body displays do not influence adaptive behavior within the investigated contexts. When compared to contractive displays, expansive displays were found to yield more favorable affective changes. Lastly, the findings indicate that further investigations into body manipulations in the context of psychopathology are warranted.
本研究调查了扩张性和收缩性身体展示对适应行为和情感结果的影响。针对过去研究的局限性，在两种不同的情境（即恐惧情境和悲伤情境）中进行了研究，与两种控制条件进行了比较，并考虑了动机特征和精神病理学症状的调节作用。186 名成年人完成了一项恐惧实验，包括模拟工作面试和一项悲伤实验，涉及悲伤情绪诱导。对于每个实验，参与者被随机分配到以下四种身体操作之一：（1）扩张；（2）收缩；（3）主动控制（即原地跑步）；或 4）被动控制（即什么都不做）。主要结果是适应行为（即适当的面试行为和积极的回忆偏差）。次要情感结果是情绪、行为倾向和评价。结果显示，身体展示对主要结果的影响较小且不显著（ds=0.19-0.28）。对于次要结果，积极情绪有显著影响（ds=0.33）。在次要结果中，两两比较表明，扩张性展示比收缩性展示产生更有利的结果。对于抑郁程度最高的参与者，与控制条件相比，身体展示条件导致的情感结果较差。研究结果表明，在研究的情境中，身体展示不会影响适应行为。与收缩性展示相比，扩张性展示被发现产生更有利的情感变化。最后，研究结果表明，需要进一步研究精神病理学背景下的身体操作。
