Hack your brain into feeling happier

The smile-first-feel-later hypothesis has just been given another workout.

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The Back Page probably speaks for all women when we say we love being told we should smile more.  

But that’s the fairly unavoidable conclusion from a large multi-lab study set up to test whether smiling really does make you feel happier.  

The facial feedback hypothesis, as it’s known, is an old chestnut but a surprisingly hard one to crack. In 2016 17 teams failed to replicate a result from 1988 in which participants holding a pen between their teeth (mimicking a smile) rated cartoons as funnier than when they held the pen between their lips.  

Now a team has investigated whether, rather than falsifying the facial feedback hypothesis, that negative result just means they were producing fake smiles the wrong way.  

That team is sweetly called the Many Smiles Collaboration, “an international group of researchers – some advocates of the facial feedback hypothesis, some critics and some without strong beliefs”. They got together to ask chiefly “whether participants would report feeling happier when posing happy versus neutral expressions”, and secondarily “(1) whether happy facial poses only influence feelings of happiness if they resemble a natural expression of happiness, (2) whether facial poses can initiate emotional experience in otherwise neutral scenarios or only amplify ongoing emotional experiences, and (3) whether facial feedback effects are eliminated when controlling for awareness of the experimental hypothesis”. 

They recruited nearly 3900 participants in 19 countries, but for the sake of answering (3) above excluded the almost half who were aware of the facial feedback hypothesis. They got them to fake-smile in three ways: the pen technique, copying images of actors “displaying prototypical expressions of happiness”, and asking them to pull certain muscles in certain directions. Half of them were also shown positive images.  

Participants reported more happiness (a change of about 30%) after posing happy versus neutral expressions, and this was not significantly increased by positive stimuli. The pen task was the only of the three to produce a small or null result, except when they included participants who knew the hypothesis.  

Rather than emotional experience and peripheral nervous system activity being independent components of an emotion response, the authors write, “our results suggest that facial feedback can impact feelings of happiness when using the facial mimicry and voluntary facial action tasks”. 

They also found that facial feedback “can not only amplify ongoing feelings of happiness but also initiate feelings of happiness in otherwise neutral contexts”.  

So if you’re feeling a bit down on this Monday afternoon, smile anyway – it’s worth a crack.  

Tell penny@medicalrepublic.com.au if you think she should cheer up, it may never happen.