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 mood-congruent 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