The Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure Affects the Detection of Facial Emotions

Fantoni and Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact and affect the actor's global experience. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they adapted participants to comfortable/uncomfortable visually-guided reaches and obtained consistent mood-congruency effects in the identification of facial emotions: a face perceived as neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable actions. Here, using a detection task, we showed that moodcongruent effects following MAMIP included sensitivity changes, indicating that action affected perception, rather than simply biasing participant’s responses. Such results suggest that models of perceived facial emotions should include action-induced mood as a predictor and support strong links between body feelings and valence of the social environment.