It is a general notion that the way we walk depends on our current mood at that time. For instance, if we feel joyful, we bounce along. If we feel anxious, we walk hurriedly. Or if we are sad, we walk with our shoulders slumped. If recent reports are to be believed, then researchers have actually found out that the opposite of this can also be true. It has been found that walking a particular way can actually have a direct effect on the mood of the individual. By imitating certain ways of walking, one can actually change his/her mood for the better.
Study patterns
It has been noted previously that happy people tend to move differently than depressed individuals. The same can be said for other emotions as well, with each having its own unique type of walk.
The study was conducted by a team of researchers at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The test group was given a list of positive words like ‘pretty’ and negative words like ‘afraid’ were given to the participants to read. According to a senior fellow at the institute, this was done to establish a link between the participants’ mood and their walking style.
The participants were then requested to walk on a treadmill for a couple of minutes. They were urged to adopt either a happy style of walking (bouncing along) or a depressed style of walking (shoulders slumped forward with limited movement of the arms). While they walked, their gait and posture were measured. A gauge shown on a screen moved right and left depending on the walking style of the participants, measuring their levels of happiness, depression, anxiousness and anger etc.
The research team urged the participants to walk in a particular style in order to move the gauge to the right or left. Following this, the participants were requested to write down a list of all the words they could recollect from the positive and negative words they had been shown earlier.
Promising results
The results of the study as published by the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry revealed that the participants who were urged to walk in a depressed style with their shoulders slumped forward experienced bad moods. In contrast to this, the participants who walked in a happier style reported experiencing comparatively better moods.
It was also noted that those who walked on the treadmill in a depressed mood could recollect more number of negative words while those who walked in a happier mood could recollect more number of positive words. These findings clearly establish a direct link between the walking style of the individual and his/her mood, thus confirming that it would be possible to change one’s mood simply by changing his/her walking style.
Results could help in treating depression
The research team at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research has based its study on the basic understanding of how an individual’s mood can affect his/her memory. Previous research has revealed that patients combating clinical depression tend to remember the more negative events of their life than the positive ones. This would only make them feel worse with time. The team believes that helping these patients to break this self-perpetuating cycle with the help of walking can easily create a very strong tool for treating depression.
The study has also successfully answered questions mentioned in the CIFAR’s Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program about how the brain converts sensory stimuli into appropriate information. The answers provided by the study would then easily help recreate the human style learning model in computers.
Summary
Recent studies conducted by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research indicate that a person’s mood is directly linked to the way he/she walks. Accordingly, the team behind the study have revealed how merely changing the style of walk can help change one’s mood, thereby creating a very powerful tool that can be used to treat depression and other mental disorders in individuals.