• examined whether brief postural adjustments – 'power poses' – could produce positive psychological, behavioural and hormonal outcomes
• revealed an emphatic 'yes' on all three questions, with the everyday implications clearly apparent
• Stressful interpersonal contexts, such as job interviews, presentations and important meetings, could be helped through preparatory postural adjustment.
• power posing became an idea whose time had come; a hugely successful TED Talk, widespread organisational acceptance and a number of eye-catching interpretations by leading politicians
• Despite this widening embrace, deeper academic questions emerged. Replication attempts did not reproduce the complete breadth of original results, and by 2016 power posing was firmly embroiled in the 'replication crisis' affecting social psychology.
• power posing would not go away
• Larger quantitative examinations of its evidentiary credentials have suggested that significant benefits do remain… though with some caveats.
• research into embodiment and embodied cognition explores how our postures and bodily movements can influence our emotional states
• lineage can be traced back to the ideomotor action ideas of 19th century philosopher and psychologist William James
• emotions arise from physiology
• bodily expressions contributed to the consequent feeling of emotions
• he manipulation of facial expressions, voice management, breathing and posture can induce diverse emotional feelings, including happiness, sadness, anger and fear
• hysical posture has provided a particularly insightful lens for examining feelings of power – and powerlessness – across both human and animal studies
• Can posed displays cause a person to feel more powerful?
• identified two distinct nonverbal dimensions universally associated with demonstration – and absence – of power, with high-power postures based on expansiveness and openness (e.g. leaning back on a chair with arms behind the head), and low-power poses based on contractive and closed positions (e.g. sitting tensely in chair with hands held tightly in lap).
• hypotheses
• Psychological changes
• Neuroendocrinal changes in dominance and stress hormones
• Adaptive behavioural changes through increased risk-tolerance
• 42 participants (26 females/16 males) were randomly assigned to each condition, and then held two postures for one minute each
• participants were told the study was about the science of physiological recordings and electrode placements, with their bodies then positioned by an experimenter into high-power or low-power poses.
• testosterone went up over baseline for the high-power group, and down for the low-power group, with cortisol going the opposite way.
• Behaviourally, there was a higher reward-focus in the high-power group, while psychologically, the high-power group felt more powerful and in control than their low-power counterparts.
• There was an exciting message to share: 'That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-minute poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications
• breakthrough into wider awareness occurred at the TEDGlobal conference in June 2012, when Amy Cuddy branched off from her collaborators with her talk 'Your body language may shape who you are'.
• Her presentation offered compelling evidence along with a moving personal narrative; a brilliant student, who had a very bad car accident resulting in significant brain injury, who then had to relearn everything in re-orienting herself in her academic world. With support from her doctoral advisor Susan Fiske, Cuddy learned to fake it till she became it, with postural awareness a key part of her success
• Her talk resonated and remains the second-most watched TED Talk of all time
• By 2015, power posing's reach was successfully making inroads across society, including some awkwardly fulsome interpretations by politicians at the 2015 Conservative Party conference
• Amy Cuddy's book Presence
• serious academic questions also began to emerge
• first notable question was raised in Psychological Science by the University of Zurich's Eva Ranehill and colleagues.
• Their 'conceptual replication' – while successfully replicating self-reported feelings of power – failed to produce significant results for the behavioural and hormonal measures.
• original authors
• listed the numerous methodological departures made by Ranehill and colleagues,
• in the spirit of openness, lead author Dana Carney made original research materials available on her academic web porta
• researchers urged this review to serve as a springboard to 'moving forward the study of nonverbal expansiveness'
• Despite this transparency, a broader replication crisis was brewing across social psychology, where established domains of evidence that had been held in high regard were simply failing to replicate.
• central reference point was The Reproducibility Project
• Brian Nosek and the Center for Open Science,
• It found that only 36 per cent of these apparently rigorous studies could replicate
• power posing's original lead author Dana Carney announced a stark personal turnaround in September of that year: 'I do not believe that "power pose" effects are real'
• Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology (CRSP) sought to draw a definitive line on the topic through a special issue devoted entirely to power posing, comprising seven pre-registered studies
• virtually zero effect' on these two measures
• this was not the case for subjective feelings of power (referred to as 'felt power'
• evealed significant results for the overall sample, as well as for sub-sample breakdowns based on prior power posing awareness
• 28 co-authors indicated that 'it is clear that an effect on felt power was observed'
• Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) submitted Carney et al.'s (2015) 33 studies to a p-curve analysis.
• P-curving is useful within replication contexts through showing the distribution of statistically significant p-values within a body of research.
• Examining the shape of p-values can inform whether selective publication, p-hacking and/or data-mining is present
• The p-curve for these studies was flat and therefore lacking in empirical support
• A major caveat to this conclusion, however, became apparent; the main analysis excluded p-values associated with subjective feelings of power, which the authors described as manipulation-checks rather than dependent variables
• Amy Cuddy
• argued that subjective experience is a central tenet of social psychology, and worthy of treatment as an equally weighted dependent variable.
• Their p-curving analyses revealed 'very strong' and 'strong' evidentiary support across their analyses, including those studies specifically examining feelings of power. They suggested these findings annulled Simmons and Simonsohn's (2017) conclusions and that researchers should be encouraged to continue investigations.
• Large analyses seemed to be indicating that while original neuroendocrinal and behavioural claims could not be supported, some promise still remained in the subjective domain… with power posing capable of facilitating significant and potentially beneficial feelings of power in individuals.
• Despite all the attention placed upon power posing's evidentiary credibility, a crucial elephant in the room was largely ignored until September 2019 when Iowa State University's Marcus Credé made an important observation in the journal Meta-Psychology
• an overwhelming number of studies included by Cuddy et al. (2018) excluded a control or 'neutral pose' condition. In other words, this evidentiary base was largely comprised of experiments located at lower levels of the hierarchy
  of scientific evidence.
• significant results could have been driven by a positive effect of an expansive pose, or a negative effect of a contractive pose… or a combination of both!
• The absence of a neutral reference point means we cannot truly know.
• In delving further into the few studies – four in all – that actually included a control or neutral pose, Credé observed overall effects predominantly driven by a negative effect from a contractive pose, rather than a positive effect emanating from an expansive pose.
• theme was more recently expanded in June 2020 through a systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by Emma Elkjær with colleagues from Aarhus, Witten/Herdecke and Columbia Universities, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science
• Their search identified randomised experimental studies examining whole body motor displays in healthy adults, with the aim of inducing an expansive or contractive posture
• heir meta-analysis showed two significant comparison outcomes: expansive versus contractive and contractive versus neutral, with the latter comparison more positive. The expansive versus neutral comparison, however, was not significant. The authors concluded that experimental effects are more influenced by the absence of contractive rather than the presence of expansive displays
• Together, these results can be taken as preliminary evidence of the impact of contractive displays on affective and behavioral responses
• advocating for future designs to include neutral controls, two other interesting recommendations emerged from their analyses.
• Firstly, cortisol was included as an outcome measure within four of the included studies, with their net inference distilling an effect size 'trending toward significance'
• it may indeed be too early to entirely dismiss cortisol as an outcome of relevance.
• Given its measurement challenges and complexities, the need for improved protocols
• was strongly endorsed.
• Secondly, contextual factors emerged as a potentially problematic area in studies to date. For example, five of their included studies indicated that incongruent conditions, such as adopting expansive postures when experiencing personal failure, had the potential to cause quite distressing outcomes
• uture experiments need to be mindful of the interpersonal and personal contexts that participants are placed in, including consideration of using personally relevant goals (rather than experimentally induced goals)
• he toll on Amy Cuddy in defending postural research against often vitriolic academic attack over the years has undoubtedly been heavy
• how did this latest meta-analysis land with power posing's foremost proponent?
• At this point, anyone who claims these effects are not real cannot support that claim with science. These findings are vindicating'. With Cuddy's next book Bullies, Bystanders, and Bravehearts scheduled for publication in 2021, a positive and forward-looking new chapter for the power posing narrative has potentially emerged
• Ten years on, power posing has possibly – and belatedly – arrived at the future research springboard that had been hoped for in the narrative review of 2015
• recent large-scale quantitative scrutiny which has suggested that posture does matter when it comes to subjectively experienced feelings of power… but it may be a question of mindful avoidance of any contractive postural tendencies, rather than forced expansion
• Adding neutral posture controls into future research designs will elucidate this important evidentiary – and practical – question
• Intra and interpersonal contexts must be more carefully addressed in experimental settings, through systematically addressing for who, how, and where postural adjustment can be most beneficial
• This will elevate power posing from a potentially misinterpreted one-size-fits-all idea, to more specific and actionable understanding.

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