Avinash Vikram Turankar, Manish Thakre, Yogesh Ajmera, Latesh Raghute, Sagar Panchal, Nishikant Mankar, Ashwita Shetty
BACKGROUND:The emotional status of an individual can change the body language. However, off late researchers have evidenced that body poses can influence hormones like testosterone and cortisol on immediate basis. The positive power poses are more open, wider and of confident kind, whereas negative power poses are contractive and less confident kind of body postures. We hypothesized that positive power poses might increase testosterone and decrease cortisol and stress on immediate basis, thereby affecting psychomotor function. Hence, it was worthwhile to conduct this study to assess the effect of power poses on psychomotor function.
METHODS: 25 healthy participants were divided into 5 groups, each of 5. Group 1 performed positive power posing on 1st day and negative power posing on the next day i.e. the same group acted as positive and negative control on two different days. We did the procedure for the remaining four groups. During each session the participants were given information about the project and were first taught about the use of reaction time app and other instruments. After this we took the 1st set of readings followed by power posing. After power posing we took the 2nd set of readings. Each power pose was of 30 seconds and the total duration of procedure lasted for 4 minutes in each session. This was one time event only on the scheduled date.
RESULTS:The intra group analysis shows that positive power posing increases critical flicker fusion time by the magnitude of 0.73 (p= 0.0038), and has shown a drop in the reaction time by 34.22 seconds (p= 0.0926). The second intra group analysis on negative power posing demonstrated that there is a statistically and clinically relevant drop in the critical flicker fusion time by 1.7 (p= 0.0001) and there is a decrease in the hand steadiness performance which is shown by increased mistake by the performers by a magnitude of 14.57 (p= 0.1122). The reaction time has increased by a big margin of 50.75 seconds (p= 0.0004). The inter group analysis shows that the positive power posing performance statistically and significantly improved critical flicker fusion test compared to the negative posing. The positive power posing postures have a tendency to improve the performance in hand steadiness test, although the difference is non-significant, when compared to negative poses. The negative power posing adversely affects the reaction time and causes more slowness in reaction which may be very crucial and important in fine motor performance.
CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that single act of positive power posing affects the various psychomotor performance tests like critical fusion test, hand steadiness test and reaction time, favorably and the negative power posing causes deterioration in above psychomotor performance parameters except hand steadiness performance.
