At least, that’s what a recent study by Casasanto and Dijkstra (2010) seems to hint at.

The researchers wanted to investigate whether physical actions can influence the retrieval of emotional memories. Specifically, they wanted to find out if, different from actions like, sitting up, frowning, or smiling, actions not directly related to emotions would help in emotional memory retrieval.

Their hypothesis was that metaphoric actions, in this case moving marbles up or down, would make it easier to retrieve, respectively, positive or negative emotions. This is similar to metaphors used in language for positive or negative feelings. For example ‘being upbeat’ (positive feeling) or ‘being down in the dumps’ (negative feeling). Casanto and Dijkstra predicted that the metaphor ‘up is good, down is bad’ would also hold for seemingly pointless movements.

The researchers devised two experiments in which participants using both their hands, had to move marbles form a bottom shelve to a top shelve, and vice versa. During this task participants were asked to recall positive life events (e.g. “Tell me about a time when you felt proud of yourself”) and negative life events (e.g. “Tell me about a time when you felt ashamed of yourself). When moving marbles up (from bottom to top shelve), participants were significantly faster in retrieving positive memories, and when moving marbles down, they were faster in retrieving negative memories.

In the second experiment, participants did the same task, but were now asked to think about anything they wanted (e.g. “Tell me about an event that happened yesterday”). When moving marbles upward, people thought of significantly more positive memories, and, when they were moving marbles downward, they remembered more negative things.

The experiments show that simple body movements can influence how, and what people think. Pondering the practical applications of this study, you could think of products and interfaces emphasizing upward movements to bring people in a ‘happy mindset’. Maybe the iPhones ‘slide to unlock’ should be vertical, sliding from bottom to top.

Of course it remains to be seen if these results really translate to real-world actions. But just to make sure, I’ll be scrolling upward as much as I can from now on!

Full reference

Casasanto, D. & Dijkstra, K. (2010). Motor action and emotional memory. Cognition, 115, 179-185.

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