Lean in: Posture affects judgment and memory of emotional language

Two experiments investigate the role of body feedback in remembering and judging the emotionality of affective language. Participants held either an open or slumped posture while reading and responding to sentences designed to have either negative or positive affect. Both experiments demonstrate a significant effect with open posture slowing emotional judgments (Experiment 1) and open posture facilitating recognition of positive words in a memory task (Experiment 2), hinting at a task-dependence. These findings reflect on three major topics of research in cognition: whether abstract concepts can be embodied, the extent to which emotion and bodily states co-occur, and how task demands determine the direction of effects.