Say cheese! Everyone has probably heard this phrase when you stand ready in front of the camera. Maybe you have to force a smile in honor of the photographer. But even if you are posing, and the smile is not necessarily completely genuine, it can still do you good. At least that’s what researchers who have studied the phenomenon think. Can a fake smile make us happy? When we are happy, the smile often comes. More or less automatically. The corners of the mouth are pulled upwards, the cheeks lift and the skin around the eyes gets charming, small wrinkles. But what if we turn the process around: Can our mood improve if we use the muscles in our face to form a smile? For a long time this question, whether facial expressions alone can influence our emotions, has been discussed among researchers in psychology. And now, in a new study, they believe they have found an answer. Forming a smile with knowledge and will can actually make us happier. – This confirms what most of us experience in our daily lives. When we meet a happy and smiling person, and send a smile back, we get in a better mood. This is what Professor Gerit Pfuhl says to news. She has been part of the international study. – We forget to wonder The study is a big collaboration. The work was led by Nicholas Coles at Stanford University in the USA. He points out that the effect of a forced smile is not enough to, for example, get out of depression. But that the finding provides useful insight into what emotions are, and where they come from. – We experience emotions so often that we forget to marvel at how incredible this ability is. Without emotions there is neither pain, joy, suffering nor happiness. This research tells us something fundamentally important about how this works, he says in a press release. But is this enough to convince the doubters? Activated the smile muscles Before Nicholas Coles carried out the study, he was very uncertain about what the results would show. Because previous research in the field has been ambiguous. In his new project, the Stanford researcher brought together people from both camps. Both those who are convinced that a forced smile affects us positively, and those who think this has nothing to do with it. Together they formed the group “The Many Smiles Collaboration”, and designed a method that everyone involved was happy with. In total, the researchers collected data from 19 countries. Almost 4,000 people participated. The researchers used three known techniques to activate the smiling muscles of the participants. If the findings in this study are indeed correct, remember to give yourself a smile in the mirror before you start the day 😉 Photo: Karina Kaupang Jørgensen / news A pen in the mouth and smiling celebrities They were divided into three groups. The first group was asked to use a method called pen-in-mouth. This is supposed to activate the same muscles that a smile does. The second group was asked to imitate facial expressions on pictures of smiling actors. While the last group was instructed to pull the corners of the mouth up towards the ears and lift the cheeks using only the muscles of the face. In each group, half of the participants performed the task while looking at cute pictures of puppies, kittens, flowers and fireworks. The other half looked at a blank screen. To disguise the aim of the experiment, the researchers also mixed in several small physical tasks. Among other things, those who took part had to solve simple tasks in mathematics. After each task, they had to rate themselves how happy or sad they felt. And the results showed differences between the various groups. Something that surprised the researchers. A step closer to understanding – We found a noticeable increase in happiness from participants who imitated smiling photographs or pulled their mouths up to their ears. But we did not find a strong change in the participants who used the pen-in-mouth technique. Something they had thought in advance. Gerit Pfuhl says so. The researchers are unsure why the task with the pen did not yield results. One theory is that the technique may not create an expression that resembles a real smile. That such a task simply becomes confusing. Nevertheless, the leader of the study, Nicholas Coles, believes that the other two tasks provide good arguments that human emotions are somehow linked to muscle movements. – A smile makes people feel happy, while a frown makes people feel angry. Thus, the conscious experience of emotions must be based at least in part on bodily sensations. Gerit Pfuhl is a researcher and professor at UiT and NTNU. She has participated in the new study. – If you make a facial expression where you smile, you feel happier than if you don’t, she says. Photo: Paul S. Amundsen / UiB
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Researchers show that even a fake smile can affect your mood in a positive direction – news Trøndelag
