54-study analysis says power posing does affect people ’s emotions and is worth researching further

By Emma Young Does power-posing –  such as standing with your hands on your hips and your feet spaced well apart – really help to improve your life? Yes – according to Amy Cuddy, one of the pioneers of the idea, at Harvard University (famous for her massively popular TED talk on the subject and her best-selling book Presence). No – according to a critical analysis by Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania, published in Psychological Science in 2017. The pair’s statistical analysis of 33 previous studies of potential posture effects led them to a damning conclusion: “the existing evidence is too weak to… advocate for people to engage in power posing to better their lives.” But now Cuddy, and colleagues, are back, with a new paper also published in Psychological Science. While Cuddy appears to be softening her claims about what power-posing can achieve, she and her colleagues argue that their new analysis shows that there is strong evidence that posture affects emotions, in particular and that power-posing is likely to have a meaningful impact on people, and should not be discounted. The new paper involves the same type of statistical analysis (called a p-curve analysis) adopted by Simmons and Simonsohn, which uses the distribution of “p values” to estimate the likelihood of falsely positive results in a given set of studies. But whereas Simmons and Simonsohn used this technique to analyse 33 published studies that Cud...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Methods Replications Source Type: blogs