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Balancing on one leg may test the stability not just of your body but also of your marriage or other intimate relationships, according to a remarkable new study of how bodily posture may affect emotional thinking.

The findings add to an emerging area of science known as embodied cognition, which studies the interconnections between our physiology and our feelings.

To understand embodied cognition, think for a moment about the word “feeling,” which refers both to a sentiment or emotion, and to the tactile process of touching something.

To scientists involved in embodied cognition, those two meanings overlap in unexpected and vibrant ways. Past studies have shown, for instance, that people who hold a warm cup of coffee tend to consider strangers as likely to be more friendly and “warm” than do people who hold a cup of iced coffee.

Further quantifying that connection, researchers in a recent neurological experiment asked volunteers to read loving, “warm” messages and emotionally neutral ones from friends while the researchers scanned their brain activity. The researchers then repeated the scanning while the volunteers held warm or cold packs. The volunteers showed increased activity in portions of the brain known to be involved in emotional processing when they read the warm messages and when they held the warm object. There was no similar overlapping brain activity when they read neutral messages and held something cold.

The results “lend credence to the description of connection experiences as ‘heartwarming,’ ” the authors conclude.

However, while many past studies had examined embodied cognition and general social interactions, few had closely examined how embodied cognition might be entwined in our romantic relationships, although they are our most passionate and, of course, heated.

So for the new study, which was published last month in Psychological Science, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Waterloo in Canada decided to examine stability, turbulence and love.

They focused on stability because it is a term that has both literal and abstract meanings. Our bodies can be physically stable or they can be wobbly, and so can our intimate relationships.

To see how stability plays out among couples, the researchers first recruited a small group of college students who reported being involved in a committed relationship that had lasted for at least a year.

The researchers then randomly assigned half of their volunteers to sit at a normal desk and the other half to sit at workstations that had been subtly altered so that both the chair and the desk wiggled slightly.

The volunteers all completed questionnaires about their lives and romantic relationships, including how satisfied they felt with their partner and whether they felt the relationship would last. (Only one member of a couple was part of the study, to encourage honesty.)

Afterward, the researchers found a strong correlation between wobbly work spaces and wobbly romantic pairings. The students who had been seated at the unstable workstations were much more likely to perceive instability in their love lives than were the students whose chairs and work spaces didn’t waver.

But that test, while intriguing, was very limited in its size and the homogeneity of its young, mostly unmarried participants.

So for the next portion of the study, the researchers used an online portal to recruit a much larger and more diverse group of volunteers, including older people, some of whom had been married for years. All said that they were part of an established, monogamous couple.

The researchers asked all of these volunteers to position themselves in front of a computer screen.

Then they asked half of the volunteers to stand on one leg, while the rest remained solidly positioned on both feet.

While holding the assigned posture, volunteers completed questionnaires about themselves and their romantic relationship, just as the students had done.

But now the researchers also had the volunteers, while still poised on one or both feet, compose a short note to their loved one, describing how the volunteer felt about his or her partner at that moment.

The results should give pause to anyone considering composing Valentine’s Day rhymes while standing on a single foot. Overwhelmingly, those volunteers who wobbled on one leg rated their relationships as more unstable and less likely to last than did the people who stood on both feet.

Their notes to loved ones also tended to be more querulous, centering on unshared housework rather than shared embraces.

Of course, the study does not show that an unstable body creates an unstable love life, said Amanda Forest, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, who led the study, only that when people feel physically unstable they are more likely to perceive their romantic relationship as similarly turbulent.

The study also was not designed to explain how bodily instability influences feelings about loved ones, although overlapping neural responses almost certainly are involved, Dr. Forest said, a possibility that she and her colleagues hope to study in the future.

For now, the findings do suggest that when contemplating the state of your relationship you should stand with both feet firmly on the ground, or sit in a sturdy, well-balanced chair, and that despite the stories we told ourselves as children, Weeble marriages are all doomed.

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