Smiling is an obvious reflection of a good mood, but the act of smiling can also improve the mood we have. That’s the finding of a study conducted by Stanford, which shows that even when we fake a smile it can still lift our mood.
It’s a question known as the facial feedback hypothesis and the study is among the first to provide strong evidence that it does, in fact, exist. Of course, the researchers are at pains to point out that the effect is relatively modest, so you can’t overcome depression just by forcing a smile, but it’s nonetheless useful to understand more about where emotions come from.
“We experience emotion so often that we forget to marvel at just how incredible this ability is. But without emotion, there’s no pain or pleasure, no suffering or bliss, and no tragedy and glory in the human condition,” the researchers say. “This research tells us something fundamentally important about how this emotional experience works.”
Many Smiles
The researchers pooled together skeptics and believers into the Many Smiles Collaboration to devise a methodology that both sides would be supportive of.
“Rather than quibble and debate over Twitter and through journal articles, which would take decades and probably not be that productive, we says, ‘Let’s just come together and design something that would please both sides,’?” they explain. “Let’s figure out a way that we could potentially convince proponents that the effect isn’t real, and potentially convince critics that the effect is real.”
The researchers conducted an experiment consisting of three well-known methods designed to encourage participants to activate their smiling muscles: the pen-in-mouth method, mimicking the facial expressions seen of actors smiling in photos, and following instructions to move the corners of their lips towards their ears and lift their cheeks using only the muscles in their face.
In each group, half of the volunteers looked at cheerful images while they performed the task, while the remainder looked at a blank screen. They also had to look at the same images while performing a neutral facial expression.
The data revealed a significant increase in happiness when the volunteers mimicked smiles from actors or when they physically pulled their mouths towards their ears. The pen-in-mouth method produced no such uplift.
“The effect wasn’t as reliable with the pen-in-mouth condition,” the authors explain. “We’re not sure why. Going into the study, we assumed that all three techniques created the correct muscular configuration for an expression of happiness. But we found some evidence that the pen-in-mouth condition may not be actually creating an expression that closely resembles smiling.”
This may be because the physical act of holding the pen might require a degree of teeth-clenching, which obviously isn’t part of any natural smile. The researchers nonetheless believe that the data from the other methods clearly provides a compelling argument to support the notion that our emotions can be linked to muscle movements.
“The stretch of a smile can make people feel happy and the furrowed brow can make people feel angry; thus, the conscious experience of emotion must be at least partially based on bodily sensations,” the researchers conclude.
“Over the past few years, the science took one step back and a few steps forward. But now we’re closer than ever to understanding a fundamental part of the human condition: emotion.”
