Why smiling makes you happy

Journal Reference : Nicholas A. Coles, Jeff T. Larsen, Heather C. A meta-analysis of the facial feedback literature: Effects of facial feedback on emotional experience are small and variable. Psychological Bulletin , ; DOI: ScienceDaily, 12 April University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Psychologists find smiling really can make people happier. Retrieved November 14, from www. The study shows the ability, among non-relatives, to both decipher facial expressions and to be attuned B efore we get started, do me a favor and grab a pen or a pencil. Now hold it between your teeth, as if you were about to try to write with it. Sit with it, and pay attention to how you feel. Are you glum? Is that any different than how you felt before? Do you feel like this weird smile tricked your brain into a slight jump in happiness?

For a long time, psychologists thought exercises like this one did make us happier. If that were true, it would have implications for what emotion is, how we experience it and where emotions come from.

But then scientists did check. T he idea that smiling can make you feel happier has a long history. In , Darwin mused about whether an emotion that was expressed would be felt more intensely than one that was repressed. Early psychologists were musing about it in the s. More than a hundred studies have been published on the topic.

In , social psychologist Fritz Strack published a study that seemed to confirm that facial feedback was real. The researchers asked participants to do more or less what I asked you to do earlier: hold a pen in their mouths in a position that forced them either to bare their teeth in a facsimile of a smile or to purse their lips around the pen.

And so the finding made its way into psychology textbooks and countless news headlines. Decades of corroboration followed, as researchers published other experiments that also showed support for the facial feedback hypothesis. Those 17 studies, coordinated by Dutch psychologist E. Wagenmakers, repeated the original study as closely as possible to see if its result held up, with just a few changes.

They found a new set of cartoons and pre-tested them to check they were about as funny as the old set. Past experiments may be unreliable because they relied on small sample sizes , buried boring or inconclusive results , or used statistical practices that make chance findings look like meaningful signals in what is really random noise.

Isha Gupta a neurologist from IGEA Brain and Spine explains, a smile spurs a chemical reaction in the brain, releasing certain hormones including dopamine and serotonin. Serotonin release is associated with reduced stress.

In a sense, the brain is a sucker for a grin. And there are plenty more studies out there to make you smile or at least, serve as reference for why you should. Studies aside, there are plenty of living, breathing, smiling humans who can testify to the fact that looking the part of happy helps them get through the day. It's part of our morning routine. If something goes awry during the day, I usually use smiling to quickly shift my mood.

It only take 10 to 15 seconds for it to make a difference for me now. It helps me to feel less stressed, transform my mood quickly and put things in a different perspective. He said the task can get old after a while, but the smiling helps him stay more energized and avoid burnout. Travel writer Clemens Sehi uses a smile not just to feel better, but also as a way of setting an amicable tone with strangers abroad.