Our mood can affect how we walk—slump-shouldered if we're sad, bouncing along if we're happy. Now researchers have shown it works the other way too—making people imitate a happy or sad way of walking actually affects their mood.
Subjects who were prompted to walk in a more depressed style, with less arm movement and their shoulders rolled forward, experienced worse moods than those who were induced to walk in a happier style, according to the study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.
CIFAR Senior Fellow Nikolaus Troje (Queen's University), a co-author on the paper, has shown in past research that depressed people move very differently than happy people.
"It is not surprising that our mood, the way we feel, affects how we walk, but we want to see whether the way we move also affects how we feel," Troje says.
He and his colleagues showed subjects a list of positive and negative words, such as "pretty," "afraid" and "anxious" and then asked them to walk on a treadmill while they measured their gait and posture. A screen showed the subjects a gauge that moved left or right depending on whether their walking style was more depressed or happier. But the subjects didn't know what the gauge was measuring. Researchers told some subjects to try and move the gauge left, while others were told to move it right.
"They would learn very quickly to walk the way we wanted them to walk," Troje says.
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