Postural Awareness Across the Lifespan: Development, Cultural Variation, and Measurement of an Embodied Capacity

Postural awareness — the capacity to perceive, interpret and regulate one’s own body position, alignment and movement — is studied in parallel across disciplines that rarely read each other. Physiotherapy and biomechanics treat it as a motor-control variable; psychology treats it as a facet of embodied self-perception with links to body image, emotion regulation and interpersonal behaviour; occupational and cross-cultural research treat it as a product of environment and norm. Each literature has developed its own instruments and its own implicit definition, with the result that it remains unclear whether these fields are describing one capacity or several. This Research Topic is built on a specific proposition: that postural awareness is a broadly shared aspect of human functioning whose manifestations, meanings and measurement vary systematically across developmental stage, cultural setting and occupational context. That claim is testable, and testing it requires the disciplines currently working in parallel to be compared directly.The primary goal of this Research Topic is to test whether postural awareness holds together as a single construct across the contexts in which it is studied. This means examining how it develops and changes across the lifespan, how cultural norms and social expectations shape both its expression and its interpretation, and whether existing measurement approaches are comparable enough across populations to support any of these comparisons. A secondary goal is to connect this construct-level work to the applied settings where postural awareness is already being targeted — rehabilitation, occupational health, and performance — so that intervention research is grounded in a clearer account of what is being trained and why it matters psychologically.We welcome empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions across the following areas. Contributions to the psychology-facing pillars should address underlying mechanisms rather than descriptive association alone; applied and clinical contributions may be directed to the participating journal where appropriate.1. Development across the lifespan Maturational and developmental aspects of postural control and awareness from childhood to older adulthood; age-related change in the accuracy and salience of body-position perception.2. Cultural and social shaping Cross-cultural, multicultural and comparative studies of body awareness and posture; the influence of cultural norms, social expectations, interpersonal distance, professional roles, and gender- and age-related expectations on how posture is perceived, regulated and interpreted.3. Psychological mechanisms and correlates Relationships between postural awareness and proprioception, interoception and sensorimotor awareness; links to body image, self-perception and psychological wellbeing; stress, emotion regulation and postural behaviour.4. Measurement and comparability Assessment of postural awareness across populations and cultural contexts; measurement invariance and the comparability of existing instruments; digital technologies and wearable sensors as measurement tools, including what they capture that self-report does not.5. Applied and clinical contexts Physiotherapy, rehabilitation and movement retraining; chronic pain, musculoskeletal disorders and functional limitations; sedentary behaviour, prolonged sitting and occupational posture in professional populations; postural awareness in athletes, dancers, musicians and performing artists; interventions targeting postural awareness and embodied functioning. Topic editors: Agnieszka Jankowicz-Szymańska, Manuel Monfort Pañego, Katarzyna Wódka, Mirela Bilc Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86194/postural-awareness-across-the-lifespan-development-cultural-variation-and-measurement-of-an-embodied-capacity