During social interactions, perception of emotions affects motor behaviour by triggering responses like freezing or approach and avoidance reactions. It is however difficult to get a clear picture of the relationship between emotion and posture as previous studies showed inconsistent results, due to methodological differences on stimuli and/or the postural measures used. In this study, we thoroughly investigate how the perception of emotions affects postural control and action tendencies, by contrasting two types of stimuli (emotional static faces or emotional videos) expressing different types of basic emotions (happy, fear, angry, sad, disgust and neutral). We also take into account some other contributing factors relying on stable individual traits (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, empathy, etc) and emotional state (e.g., anxiety). Our results show that dynamic stimuli have a greater impact than static stimuli on postural control. Moreover, a crucial aspect of our work lay in the modulation of the relationship between emotions and posture, by stable individual traits.
Keywords: Approach avoidance; Emotion; Personality traits; Postural control; Posture.