What if the secret to happiness was as easy as a smile? This is what a new American study confirms on the influence of our facial expressions in the birth of feelings and emotions.
It illuminates our features, makes our face shine and can transform our attitude. It’s a fact: a smile is the most recognizable and communicative facial expression there is.
The smile also has a “magic” power: that of making us happy. In any case, a new study published in the Psychological Bulletin. According to its authors, facial expressions, starting with a smile, have a direct impact on our emotions and our well-being.
Disagreements between researchers for a century
To determine whether smiling could induce feelings of happiness, researchers at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Texas A&M combined data from 138 studies involving more than 11,000 participants.
“According to popular wisdom, we can feel a little happier if we just smile. She also says that we can put ourselves in a more serious mood if we scowl,” says Nicholas Coles, doctoral student in social psychology at the ‘University of Tennessee and Principal Investigator. “But psychologists have disagreed on this idea for over a hundred years.”
These disputes escalated further in 2016, when 17 teams of researchers failed to replicate a well-known experiment showing that the physical act of smiling can make people happier. “Some studies have not found evidence that facial expressions can influence emotional feelings,” continues Nicholas Coles. “But we can’t focus on the results of just one study. Psychologists have been testing this idea since the early 1970s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence.”
A real interaction between mind and body
Using a statistical technique called meta-analysis, the researchers combined data from 138 studies involving more than 11,000 participants from around the world. According to the results, facial expressions do have an impact on feelings. For example, smiling makes people happier, say the researchers. But this reciprocity between facial expressions and feelings also works for less positive emotions. They have shown that grinding your teeth can make people angry and frown more sad.
“We do not think that people can smile to achieve happiness”, nuance Nicholas Coles. “But these findings are exciting because they provide a clue to how the mind and body interact to shape our conscious experience of emotions. We still have a lot to learn about these facial feedback effects, but this meta-analysis allowed us to better understand how emotions work. “
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