Have you ever heard or used expressions such as these?
"She lifted my spirits with her positive outlook."
"During the downturn my hopes were dashed on the rocks."
"My heart sunk when the earnings report came out."
"I felt high as a kite when I landed that job."
These metaphorical expressions, and others like them, use movement in association with positive and negative feelings. This is not accidental. For a long time studies and language analysis has shown that mood, feelings, and emotional categories are associated with body movement, especially in the up and down directions.
"Positive emotions are implicitly associated with upward movements and and negative emotions with downward movements," according to researchers Daniel Casasanto and Katinka Dikstra in a paper posted in a recent edition of Cognition. These researchers simply asked people to remember episodes from their lives as they moved marbles either from the top of a box to the bottom or vice versa. The simple act of movement colored the resulting amount of positive or negative feelings associated with the memory, whether the participants were asked to remember a good time or a bad time in their lives.
In my workshops I demonstrate how spontaneous body movements are and how important certain types of body language and gesturing are in conveying information on the emotional channel. In my view a great deal of emotionally relevant information is suppressed in environments where people feel compelled to over-control their body language. And a great deal of emotional channel confusion can result from poorly controlled body language expressions.
I'm not suggesting Wall Street trading floor levels of gesticulation are appropriate for most meetings, but a lot of emotional information is appropriately conveyed in our hand movements and facial expressions. What is important is that leaders learn to use their natural repertoire of movements to convey what they mean.
As the two researchers conclude, "Motor actions can influence how efficiently people recollect emotional memories, and can also partly determine whether people choose to remember episodes with positive or negative valence."
Comments