Dušanka Novaković (1), Urška Puh (2), Mara Bresjanac (1)
(1) LNPR, Institute of Pathophysiology, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Medicine, Ljubljana, Slovenia
(2) University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ljubljana, Slovenia
The goal of our research was to determine if an instructed brief adoption of a dominant or submissive body pose influences subjects’ sensitivity to temperature change and their threshold for thermal pain.
Effective dominant and submissive poses were selected through a web-based survey, where participants had to briefly adopt one of six specified poses and subsequently rate how each pose made them feel. The highest rated dominant and submissive pose was used in the present study where sensitivity to temperature change and thermal pain threshold were assessed in healthy volunteers prior to and after adoption of a randomly assigned pose. Thermode of a commercial Medoc Pathway PSES device was placed on the dominant hand's thenar. In temperature change detection test, temperature gradually changed from neutral to warm or cold and subjects had to report the first detected change and its direction. In thermal pain threshold measurements, participants were told to press the button as soon as the thermal stimulus reached a painful level, which immediately reset the thermode temperature back to neutral.
After initial baseline thermosensorymetric assessment, a voice recording guided subjects into a proper adoption of a randomly assigned pose three consecutive times for twenty seconds. Immediately thereafter thermosensitivity was assessed again. Using standardised questionnaires participants rated how powerful/powerless the adopted pose made them feel, and gave an estimate of their own dominance/submissiveness.
Preliminary results indicate that both dominant and submissive pose adoption affected sensitivity to temperature change, while only the dominant pose adoption acutely increased thermal pain threshold.
Keywords: embodied cognition, nonverbal communication, power posing