Change the Way You Walk to Change Your Mood: How Walking Style Impacts Your Feelings

The way we walk can be affected by our mood. For example, we slump our shoulders when we're sad, or bounce along when we're happy. Now, researchers found that the opposite is also true; you can imitate a happy or sad way of walking to affect your mood.

"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," said Nikolaus Troje, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The scientists gave participants a list of positive and negative words, such as "pretty," "afraid" and "anxious." Then, they asked the volunteers to walk on a treadmill while they measured their gait and posture. A screen showed the participants a gauge that moved left or right depending on whether their walking style was happy or sad, but the subjects didn't know what the gauge was measuring. The scientists told the volunteers to try to move the gauge to the left or right, and they quickly learned which way to walk to make that happen.

After the experiment, the volunteers were asked to write down as many words as they could remember from the earlier list. The researchers found that those walking in a negative way remembered more negative words, while those walking in a happy manner remembered more positive words.

"If you can break that self-perpetuating cycle, you might have a strong therapeutic tool to work with depressive patients," said Troje.

The findings reveal that mood can affect memory. This, in turn, shows how simply changing the way you walk can affect your mood. In addition, this study contributes to CIFAR's Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program, which aims to unlock the mystery of how our brains convert sensory stimuli into information.

The findings are published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.