Fantoni and Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts
associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact
and affect the actor's global experience. Using a novel Motor
Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they adapted
participants to comfortable/uncomfortable visually-guided
reaches and obtained consistent mood-congruency effects in
the identification of facial emotions: a face perceived as
neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after
comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable
actions. Here, using a detection task, we showed that moodcongruent
effects following MAMIP included sensitivity
changes, indicating that action affected perception, rather than
simply biasing participant’s responses. Such results suggest
that models of perceived facial emotions should include
action-induced mood as a predictor and support strong links
between body feelings and valence of the social environment.
