Power poses - help or hype? A critical reflection of research

Rosie is an incoming 2nd year psychology student at the University of Bath and the Wellbeing team lead for Future Frontline. Interested in the mind-body connection, she aspires to pursue a career in clinical health psychology: considering how mental health can influence physical health conditions. She enjoys exploring research into how we can maintain our mental wellbeing, which she shares on her instagram page @mindbodystrategist.

One of the 12 ‘rules for life’ from renowned psychologist Jordan Peterson is: ‘Stand up straight with your shoulders back’.⁠ When taken literally, what good can this really do?

Amy Cuddy’s TED talk: ‘‘How your body language shapes who you are” led to incredible hype over the potential for posture manipulation such as ‘power poses’ to positively influence the way we feel.

This article will outline what power poses are, evaluate research into this field and suggest some strategies you may want to try for yourself. Intrigued?

1.    What are power poses?

Power poses are open, expansive poses suggested to increase feelings of power, compared to closed poses (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010).

Power pose research is by no means unique in considering how body language (posture, movement, gesture, breathing patterns etc.) may influence our thoughts, feelings and emotions. Instead, Cuddy’s research contributes to the growing field of embodied cognition (Varela, Rosch & Thompson, 1992). Example research from this field suggests that engaging the ‘smile muscles’ increases self-reported positive feelings (Soussignan, 2002) and that tilting the head upwards increases pride (Stepper & Strack, 1993).

2.    What does the power pose research tell us?

P-curve analysis aims to produce more accurate insight into data by controlling for the selective publishing and rigged statistical analyses which can occur in research to produce more ‘interesting’ outcomes. Findings from two p-curve analyses of up to 55 studies (Cuddy et al., 2018; Simmons & Simonsohn, 2017) and a replication by Ranehill et al. (2015), bring us to the following conclusions...

• Substantial evidence suggests that power poses increase self-reported feelings of power.

• Further psychological benefits have been evidenced, including: increased positive emotion, retrieval and recall of positive versus negative memories, and self-evaluation.  

• Empirical support for hormonal and behavioural impact is currently lacking. However, it has been suggested that methodology at these levels has been inappropriate (Cuddy, Schultz & Fosse, 2018; Davis et al., 2017). At a hormonal level, for example, it is possible that the timing of saliva sampling needs to be more greatly considered (too short/long a duration between sampling may influence findings). How long an individual performs power poses for is another factor that may influence changes at this level (Davis et al., 2017).

3.    What can I take from this?

Conscious manipulation of body posture is a practical and readily repeatable strategy. Research suggests it can impact the way we feel. 

What state do you want even more of? Calm? Confidence? Positivity? A couple of approaches you could try for yourself that may help maintain mental wellbeing include:

→ What posture represents the feeling you want even more of? Embody this.

→ Who is a great example of feeling the way you want to feel? Notice the way they sit, stand, move, hold themselves, gesture. Copy this. 

4.    What’s in store for the future?

As hinted above, further research is needed into the precise conditions that may induce these feelings eg. exact poses, time performing them etc., in addition to greater consideration of the way we measure at a hormonal and behavioural level.

Insight into how body manipulation influences our feelings and thoughts could lead to a more unified mind-body focus in clinical psychology approaches such as CBT (Hauke, Lohr & Pietrzak, 2016). Research suggests that subjects who consciously express positive emotion with their body and facial expressions were able to help counteract negative attention focus associated with depression (Joorman and Gotlib, 2010; Michalak, Rohde & Troje, 2015). However, before implementation in therapeutic practice, further research is needed with clinical populations. 

 References

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21, 1363–1368.

 Cuddy, A. J. C. (Producer). (2012). Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en#

 Cuddy, A. J., Schultz, S. J., & Fosse, N. E. (2018). P-curving a more comprehensive body of research on postural feedback reveals clear evidential value for power-posing effects: Reply to Simmons and Simonsohn (2017). Psychological science, 29(4), 656-666.

 Davies, G. (2019). Measuring Risk Tolerance Badly Is As Bad As Not Measuring It At All. Retrieved August 28, 2020 from https://oxfordrisk.com/measuring-risk-tolerance-badly-is-as-bad-as-not-measuring-it-at-all/

 Davis, M. L., Papini, S., Rosenfield, D., Roelofs, K., Kolb, S., Powers, M. B., & Smits, J. A. (2017). A randomized controlled study of power posing before public speaking exposure for social anxiety disorder: No evidence for augmentative effects. Journal of anxiety disorders, 52, 1-7.

 Gotlib, I. H., & Joormann, J. (2010). Cognition and depression: current status and future directions. Annual review of clinical psychology, 6, 285-312.

 Hauke, G., Lohr, C., & Pietrzak, T. (2016). Moving the mind: embodied cognition in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). European Psychotherapy, 13, 154-178.

 Michalak, J., Rohde, K., & Troje, N. F. (2015). How we walk affects what we remember: Gait modifications through biofeedback change negative affective memory bias. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 46, 121-125. 

 Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women. Psychological Science, 26, 653–656.

 Simmons, J. P., & Simonsohn, U. (2017). Power posing: P-curving the evidence. Psychological science. 28(5).

 Soussignan, R. (2002). Duchenne smile, emotional experience, and autonomic reactivity: a test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Emotion, 2(1), 52.

 Stepper, S., & Strack, F. (1993). Proprioceptive determinants of emotional and nonemotional feelings. Journal of personality and social psychology, 64(2), 211.

 Varela, F. J., Rosch, E., and Thompson, E. (1992). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.