Power in the brain: recalling powerful behaviour expands body schema boundaries

A growing body of research has shown that the psychological experience of power causes people to misperceive their height. As such, people perceive themselves as taller when they felt more powerful. Combining research on embodied cognition with that on neurostimulation, we tested whether feeling powerful affects the vertical boundaries of the own body schema by measuring corticospinal excitability. Participants (N=55) were randomly assigned to feel high power, low power, or positive mood unrelated to power and were asked to view an object positioned either in the peripersonal or in the extrapersonal vertical space. We assessed corticospinal excitability by measuring motor evoked potentials (MEPs) using TMS-EMG co-registration. Results show that in the high power condition MEPs did not differ when the object was in the peripersonal (vs extrapersonal) space. Thus, feeling powerful induces changes in the body representation that is traceable also at the corticospinal level and arises from a remapping of peripersonal space boundaries. Taken together, our findings extend prior work by revealing that the symbolic association between power and height impacts self-perception and the surrounding environment.