Postural responses to emotional visual stimuli

Postural control is a motor skill that allows individuals to interact with their environment. Indeed, in all species, development of postural control is a prerequisite for acquiring further motor abilities. In humans, the maintenance of a bipedal posture plays an important role in interaction with the environment, as it provides a stable postural basis allowing upper limbs and hands to be used to manipulate objects. On the other hand, this bipedal posture induces a constraint in terms of balance, as individuals have to deal with a relatively small base of support enclosed by the surface of the two feet. Biomechanical principles underlying postural control have been studied in great depth, but the effect of emotion on postural control seems to be an emergent topic. Over the last two decades, an exponential number of studies have been published at the interface of affective and social neurosciences. Moreover, the interactions between motor and affective processes are increasingly documented in the scientific literature. In this article, we try to synthetize main recent empirical results that have allowed exploration of the link between body posture and emotional processing.