Change in walking style can influence your mood

A new study has observed that the way one walks actually affects their mood.

The study approached subjects where they were prompted to walk in a more depressed style, with less arm movement and their shoulders rolled forward, experienced worse moods than those who were induced to walk in a happier style.

CIFAR Senior Fellow Nikolaus Troje (Queen's University), a co-author on the paper, asserted that it was not surprising that their mood, the way they feel, affects how they walked, but they wanted to see whether the way they moved also affects how they felt.

Troje continued that the study builds on their understanding of how mood could affect memory. Clinically depressed patients were known to remember negative events, particularly those about themselves, much more than positive life events.

Troje added that as social animals they spent so much time watching other people, and they were experts at retrieving information about other people from all sorts of different sources.

The study is published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.