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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Thanks to the Laboratoire Vision Action Cognition and @c2slab.bsky.social -- this publication marks the end of an important chapter for me!

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Most of the approach–avoidance literature uses instruction-dependent tasks. Postural sway offers key advantages: it is spontaneous, ecological, and time-sensitive. With N = 152, this is the largest study to date using this paradigm (see onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...).

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library

This meta-analysis provides critical insights into the use of postural measures for assessing approach, avoidance, and freezing responses to emotional stimuli. By synthesizing 44 studies, it highligh...

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

- Why this matters: This study supports a socio-functional account of emotion perception. It shows that reacting to someone's face is determined by subtle 'low-level' cues such as gaze direction, but also (to some limited extent in this study) 'high-level' aspects such as your personality.

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Personality effects were not the main driver overall (Big Five and schizotypal traits showed limited, non-conclusive moderation), though more fine-grained patterns emerged in exploratory analyses. Which you can also explore there: jeanmoneger.shinyapps.io/InPact_Study/

jeanmoneger.shinyapps.io

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

😡 Angry and fearful faces elicited defensive responses, i.e. backward body sway. 👀 Gaze direction mattered— interestingly averted fearful gaze shifted the response toward a relative approach ➡️ A fearful person looking past you might motivate means something threatening might be behind you! 😱

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

We used a more natural measure that requires no explicit instruction at all: participants stood on force plates while watching approaching faces (angry, fearful, sad, neutral), with direct vs averted gaze. We tracked subtle and spontaneous shifts in posture as an index of approach vs avoidance.

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Most work on approach–avoidance relies on joystick or response-time paradigms, where task instructions can change what the “same” movement actually means (e.g., pushing a joystick can mean approach, or pushing away; and pulling it can mean withdrawing or pulling toward).

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

In that split second, several things might matter: ➡️ What emotion you perceive (anger? fear?...) ➡️ Where the person is looking (At you? Behind you?) ➡️ Your own personality (e.g., are you sensitive to threats?)

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Why do we display our own emotions so visibly on our faces? Charles Darwin argued: facial expressions are part of how we communicate. Crucially, they also shape what others do next. Imagine: someone is walking toward you with an angry expression. Do you approach? Freeze? Step away?

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

💫 Just published in Emotion 💫 😨 😡 "Should I Stay or Should I go: An Exploration of Spontaneous Postural Behaviours Following Threatening Emotion Perception" 😡 😨 Authored with my colleagues Dorine Vergilino-Perez, @lchaby.bsky.social & Chrystel Besche-Richard osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Reposted by Jean Monéger

Roger Giner-Sorolla @rogerthegs.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

If you're attending the online APS Global Summit, don't miss our roundtable tomorrow with the first reports from our Leverhulme grant about the collective perception of nurses, soldiers, cops, underwater welders, etc. as heroes! www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

Thursday, October 23 9:00 PM - 9:45 PM EDT VIDEO ROUNDTABLE Hard to be a Hero: Causes and Consequences of Framing Occupations As Heroic

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Bonus: an R package to pre-process and extract postural indicators (e.g. average CoP, sway path length, confidence ellipses). I hope this will help with transparency. 📦 : github.com/JeanMoneger/BalanceMate/ 📖 : jeanmoneger.com/book/ If you work with force plates, I’d love your feedback on this! 🙏

github.com

GitHub - JeanMoneger/BalanceMate: Managing, Pre-processing, And Processing Postural Data

Managing, Pre-processing, And Processing Postural Data - JeanMoneger/BalanceMate

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Bottom line: Force plates are great tools! Ecological, instruction-free, and capture potentially automatic behaviors — But they’re not magic. Researchers need to be transparent about how signal is processed and stay realistic about the statistical power they can achieve.

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

💡Recommendations: - Greater transparency in reporting procedures. - Larger sample sizes Do not base your sample size on the average postural study, our meta-analysis suggest this might not be enough. We recommend aiming to detect effect sizes consistent with other approach/avoidance measures.

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Many papers miss core methods (initial posture, stimulus arousal, force-plate type, pre-processing). Also, average sample size = 40 participants --> With this sample size, you’d be expecting an effect “detectable to the naked eye” (to paraphrase Cohen), dz ≈ 0.45!

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Jean Monéger @jeanmoneger.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

With Dorine Vergilino-Perez, @lchaby.bsky.social, & Chrystel Besche-Richard, we meta-analysed force-plate studies on body sway while viewing (un)pleasant stimuli. => Weak valence effect on posture.

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Reposted by Jean Monéger

Matthew B. Jané @matthewbjane.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Happy Friday everyone! I just posted what I think is an important blog post on my website. It is a critique of meta-meta-analyses: meta-analyses of meta-analyses. Link: matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/b... #stats #metascience

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Reposted by Jean Monéger

simine vazire @simine.com · 08/05/2025

My editorial on how journals can earn trust. We often use journal names as proxies for quality. This is bad bc it’s not valid. But it could be. Editors could make journal name a valid signal. And we could place value on journals that show us how they do that. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

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