Can Smiling Really Make You Happier?
“Conventional wisdom tells us that we can feel a little happier if we simply smile. Or that we can get ourselves in a more serious mood if we scowl,” says Nicholas Coles, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT). “But psychologists have actually disagreed about this idea for over 100 years.”
Some studies have found evidence that facial expressions can lead people to feel the emotions related to those expressions, while other studies have found no such effect. Researchers at UT and Texas A&M decided to comprehensively look at the matter by analyzing almost 50 years of data testing.
The researchers used a statistical technique called meta-analysis, combining data from 138 studies that tested more than 11,000 participants worldwide. They found that facial expressions do have a small impact on feelings. So, smiling does make people feel happier—even if only by a small degree.
“We don’t think that people can smile their way to happiness,” says Coles, the lead researcher of this project. “But these findings are exciting because they provide a clue about how the mind and the body interact to shape our conscious experience of emotion. We still have a lot to learn about these facial feedback effects, but this meta-analysis put us a little closer to understanding how emotions work.”
Lisa Cunningham (USA)
Lisa Cunningham is director of marketing content and communications for ICF. She holds a master’s degree in professional writing with a focus on web content development from Chatham University and a bachelor’s degree in English writing and communication from the University of Pittsburgh.
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