Psychologists tend to think more about the mind than the body. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this trend, with scientists in recent years exploring how physical cues and sensations (i.e., Schwarz & Lee, 2018; Shapiro, 2019), or the contents of our guts (i.e., Aktipis & Guevara Beltran, 2021; Alcock, Malley, & Aktipis, 2014) may shape how we feel and make judgments about others and the world around us. Today we tackle another way in which our bodies affect our psychology: physical strength.
Policy Preferences
It turns out that stronger people are more likely they are to support policies that would benefit themselves and others around them. This is particularly true for men. In a series of studies, Michael Bang Petersen and his colleagues (2013) found that support for policies that would redistribute economic resources varied as a function of both men’s social class and their upper body strength. Men who were stronger were more likely to support such policies if they were lower in socio-economic status, and less likely to do so if they were higher in status. These effects were found in samples in societies that differ in many ways, including the U.S., Argentina, and Denmark, suggesting that this may be a fairly universal pattern. The authors argue that greater strength may incline people to support policies that would enhance their resources, as in ancestral times stronger people would be in a better position to win in physical conflicts or disputes.
Attractiveness
Upper body strength also appears to be an important determinant of men’s attractiveness. When shown a series of photographs of men whose physical strength differed, estimates of a male target’s strength were a powerful predictor of how attractive raters found them. In fact, over 70 percent of the variability in ratings of attractiveness of different targets was explained by the raters' estimates of their upper-body strength (Sell, Lukazsweski, & Townsley, 2017).
Why might this be? One theory is that upper-body strength provides a cue to a male partner’s potential to protect one’s offspring, and in fact, research suggests that men with stronger physiques are perceived as more capable of such protection (Brown, Donahoe, & Boykin, 2022).
Anxiety, Depression, and Anger
Physical strength doesn’t just matter for men. In fact, recent work suggests that differences in upper body strength may also help us understand differences in anxiety observed between men and women. Another set of recent studies, which measured grip strength, found that the higher average levels of anxiety reported by women vs. men in these samples could be explained, at least in part, by differences in physical strength (Kerry & Murray, 2021). Among both men and women, perceived physical formidability was also negatively linked to anxiety and depression. Thus, to some extent, sex differences in these aspects of mental health appear to be related in part to average differences in physical strength.
Physical strength has also been explored in terms of its links to anger. Another set of studies measured strength in terms of how much weight participants could lift. The researchers found that the more weight men could lift, the more likely they were to report frequently experiencing anger, the more likely they were to say they had been involved in physical fights in the past, and the more likely they were to succeed in interpersonal conflicts (Sell, Toobey, & Cosmides, 2009).
There were trends in a similar direction for women, but the effects were much smaller and generally not significant. Interestingly, for women, one’s perceived physical attractiveness was a better predictor of anger as well as self-reported success in personal conflicts.
Conclusion
Taken together, this brief survey of findings suggests that our bodies indeed shape our mental processes and our behavior. Individual differences in strength can help us understand the kinds of policies people are likely to support, how prone they are to anger, and how likely they are to suffer from anxiety or depression. Physical strength also plays an important role in determining men’s attractiveness and it may help us to understand sex differences in the prevalence of certain mental health symptoms.
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How Physical Strength Affects Mood, Behavior, and Politics - Psychology Today
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