Relations between imaginative experience and feeling with postural attitudes and tensions

Abstract

The present study examines the relationships between  postural attitudes  with mental imagined life situations,  levels of subjective feeling  of 30 undergraduate male and female psychology students. We  think that the variations of muscular tone (Basic Tensions) are crucial not only for the form assumed from a posture and the feeling related to it.

Previous research and clinical experiences has shown the relationship between postural attitudes of the neck and shoulders, generated by different levels of muscle tension and styles of emotional organizing.

We hypothesize that the individual differences of  postures can be considered almost a personality trait.

We used a grid to describe morphologically five postural attitudes. Subjects we asked  1- to imagine three living situations in which they feel well-differentiated features 2-  then to reproduce mentally the same living situations and simultaneously to assume each of  the postures indicated by the grid. For each living situation, after assuming each posture  subjects  were asked to indicate the vividness of the mental representation and the feeling level. The results have shown that some postural attitude significantly reduce the intensity of the negative feeling connected with the mental representation. Moreover, the different postures also significantly affect the vividness.