Most of my research for years has tested this kind of prediction, for a wide variety of behaviors and feelings. As self-perception theory predicts, people who are induced to act as if they feel something report actually feeling it, even when they are unaware of how they are acting, or the way in which their feelings arise. This effect has been demonstrated for a wide variety of feelings, and with an even wider variety of behaviors. One implication of self-perception theory is that cues from a number of different emotional behaviors should combine to produce stronger feelings than the parts alone. Additive effects of facial expressions and postures on emotional feelings.
People appear to differ in how strongly they respond to their own bodily reactions and behaviors.
Some people are very responsive, and feel happy when induced to smile, angry when induced to frown, more sad and less confident when they sit in a slumped posture, more in love when the exchange mutual gaze with a stranger, etc. In contrast, women more responsive to personal cues enjoyed the pictures less, and their self-esteem dropped, apparently because these women used the models as standards of comparison. Alex Genov and others have recently found that people who are more responsive to personal cues detect pain more rapidly in the cold pressor task, and tolerate less pain than do people more responsive to situational cues. Premenstrual tension appears to be a misattribution or misperception, in which bodily states produced by monthly hormonal changes are mistaken as emotional. If so, we should be able to predict which women will experience PMS, and should be able to at least temporarily alleviate it.