The winners' body language - it's biological

Throwing their heads back, thrusting their arms in the air, puffing out their chests, and flashing big grins, Olympic athletes from across the world follow the same triumphant choreography each night.

They aren't just gold medal-clad copycats; a study released last week says that such displays of pride seem to have biological underpinnings, shared with chest-beating mountain gorillas and strutting monkeys.

For insight into pride and shame, scientists studied the aftermath of judo matches from the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games, comparing the behavior of winning and losing judo players. They found that victory looked the same across cultures, and even among athletes who were born blind, and could never have learned the behavior from watching their peers celebrate victory.

"The reason we do this isn't because we see others do it or because it's what we've been told to do," said Jessica Tracy, lead author and assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. "That behavior, that movement is hard-wired."

Researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week that the blind and sighted athletes' body language showed the same patterns, not only when they expressed pride, but when they felt shame.

The idea that the exultant fist pump or dejected shoulder slump is based in biology may seem like a no-brainer to anyone watching the Olympics, who can instantly distinguish the gold medal swimmer from those who didn't place well.

But it's hard to determine whether those are learned behaviors or innate biological responses to pride and shame.

In the history of emotion research, there has been an emphasis on studying certain emotions that had a clear evolutionary purpose, Tracy said. Anger, for instance, could serve to prepare a person for a confrontation, while fear may prepare them to flee.

But emotions that require a certain level of self-consciousness, such as pride and shame, have generally been trickier to test.

The new study "goes a long way toward suggesting these have a deeper biological origin," said David DeSteno, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern University. "It makes sense, because humans live in social groups and, evolutionarily speaking, navigating the social environment is important - not just avoiding danger, but living with other people and dealing with issues of relationships. Who am I going to lead or follow?"

But even as the researchers found universal expressions of pride and shame, they also discovered a distinctive difference they chalked up to cultural repression: Among Western cultures, sighted athletes who lose tend not to physically express shame, whereas their blind counterparts do.The researchers guessed that could stem from cultural norms.

"Shame is really stigmatized in Western cultures; we're not supposed to talk about it, we're supposed to be proud of ourselves no matter what," Tracy said.

The Olympic and Paralympic games turn out to be a perfect laboratory for understanding the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. When a person can be confident of being the best volleyball player or doing the best balance beam routine in the world, modesty flies out the window.

It may be a bit more difficult to nail down some of the other emotions Tracy and others have been working on: embarrassment, guilt, and humiliation. The researchers want to figure out whether such emotions have their origins in society or biology, and better understand what role those emotions play.

"Basically, it's just trying to understand the systems that we have within us that shape our behavior," DeSteno said.

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.