Most people probably recall shrill childhood orders to sit up straight – directives that often came with ominous warnings about future back pain and spinal damage.
How a person sits does not just play a part in lumbar health, but also probably affects his or her feelings and can play a part in decision-making.
This is according to Canada’s McGill University, where psychologists and psychiatrists recently conducted a series of tests showing that people who sit upright are likely to be more dynamic and positive than those who slump.
Participants who sat up straight “performed better at a risk-taking task and reported more positive feelings than did their peers in the slouching or control groups”, the team says.
The outcomes “raise interesting questions” about how seating and desks should be arranged at workplaces, they add.
The risk-taking part of the experiment showed the straight-of-spine winning rewards despite eventually taking on more risk as the test proceeded.
In the end, this group also reported “significantly higher feelings of pride”, which the university said was “associated with a positive mood”.
“This suggests they were not acting more impulsively, but rather, were engaging in more effective risk-taking,” said study co-author and Department of Psychiatry associate professor Dr Jorge Armony.
He warned however, that the findings “do not mean that changing posture can dramatically transform a person’s life”.
Assoc Prof Armony and his research assistant Soren Wainio-Theberge wrote up the findings for the British Journal of Psychology.
They noted that they were following up on previous research suggesting that “adopting physical expressions of emotion” can have “feedback effects” on how people think and act.
The researchers said they achieved the varying postures by “merely changing the height of the tablet that participants used to complete the task”, meaning that their tests differed from preceding efforts by not directing the participants.
The tweaks prompted participants to adopt an upright or slumped position in turn, which the scientists contended prompted “robust and reliable effects of posture on mood and risk-taking behaviour” than if the participants were told to sit one way or another. – dpa
