Does looking up and walking upright effect your emotions?

Walking upright and looking up is a major part of a love breathing walking meditation. Some other types of walking meditation instruct one to look at their feet. I never understood this and when I tried it, it made it harder to feel uplifted, to feel joyful.

I asked AI if there were any studies which supported this. Here is the response:

Walking upright studies

Great question for your website content. Let me search for the actual research.Yes — there is genuine scientific evidence supporting this, coming from several converging lines of research. Here's a thorough breakdown:

1. Gaze Direction Directly Affects Mood

The most directly relevant study comes from the University of Auckland. A study titled "Things are Looking Up: The Effect of Eye Gaze Direction on Mood" found that eye gaze direction can influence psychological states and behavior, and may play a significant role in the observed effects between posture and mood. The findings suggest implications for alleviating negative mood.

Additionally, researchers found that gaze direction affects self-reported emotion in a metaphorically consistent manner — participants felt more pleased when gazing upward. Studies also corroborate the association between emotion and spatial position, specifically the metaphorical mapping of "up/bright" with positive states and "down/darkness" with negative ones.

2. Walking Posture (Which Drives Gaze Direction) Affects Mood

A study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry found that subjects prompted to walk in a more depressed style — with less arm movement and shoulders rolled forward — experienced worse moods than those induced to walk in a happier style. Importantly, those with a depressed gait also remembered more negative words, while those with an upbeat gait recalled more positive words.

A study by Nair et al. (2015) demonstrated this experimentally — participants asked to adopt an upright posture reported feeling more enthusiastic, excited, and strong, while those who slouched reported feeling fearful, hostile, nervous, passive, dull, and sluggish.

3. Looking Down at a Phone While Walking Makes You Feel Worse

This is particularly compelling real-world evidence. A randomized controlled trial of 125 adults found that those who walked in a park while looking at a mobile phone walked with a more stooped posture and experienced significant decreases in positive mood, affect, and feelings of power, as well as increases in negative mood — whereas the phone-free group experienced the opposite. Feeling connected with nature significantly mediated the mood effects.

4. The Posture-Mood Connection Is Bidirectional

Research by Erik Peper found that emotions and thoughts affect posture and energy levels, and conversely posture and energy affect emotions and thoughts. The increase of collapsed walking — from looking down at smartphones — may be connected to the rise of depression in recent years.

Elizabeth Broadbent, Ph.D. of the University of Auckland, whose own experience of walking slumped and looking at the ground inspired her research, found that adopting an upright posture can help people feel better, though she notes that context and situation matter and more research is needed.

The Honest Nuance

The research strongly supports that upright posture + looking forward or upward = better mood compared to slouching and looking down. However most studies measure posture as a whole package rather than isolating the specific angle of gaze (up vs. forward vs. down) during walking. The gaze direction studies tend to be lab-based rather than during actual walking. So the evidence is strong and converging but not yet from a single definitive "look up while walking" study.

Key Papers for Your Website

• Nair et al. (2015) — upright vs. slumped posture and mood — Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

• Troje & colleagues (2014) — walking style and mood — Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

• Broadbent et al. (2017) — posture and depression — Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

• "Things are Looking Up" (University of Auckland) — gaze direction and mood — available via ResearchSpace Auckland

• Mobile phone walking RCT (2023) — published in MDPI Psychiatry journal

All findable on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov or Google Scholar.