Using bodily displays to facilitating approach action outcomes within the context of a personally relevant task

Considerable attention has been paid to the effect of bodily (expansive and contractive) displays on affective, behavioral, and hormonal outcomes. However, the majority of past studies are limited by a lack of control groups with neutral displays and low personal relevance of the experimental tasks employed. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of adopting different bodily displays, including neutral displays, within the context of a personally relevant task.

In an experiment with healthy participants (N = 90), we investigated the effects of two different bodily manipulations (i.e., expansive and contractive), compared to a control group (i.e., neutral displays). Effects were evaluated in terms of completed valued action in addition to processes considered potentially helpful in preparing and motivating the individual to take valued action, including a change in emotion experience, action tendencies, and appraisals.

Several main effects were detected and only few significant interaction effects were revealed. In case of group differences, results showed that expansive bodily displays outperformed the control group, leading to more positive emotions, more approach action tendencies, less negative emotion variability, and less avoidance action tendencies toward threat.

These results mainly suggest that identifying a valued action and explicating the underlying motivational conflict may be beneficial regardless of bodily displays. This conclusion runs somewhat counter both to our hypotheses and to findings in recent meta-analytic work. However, previous experiments have not evaluated the effect of bodily displays within a personally relevant context.