Turns Out, Faking A Smile Might Not Make You Happier After All

Perhaps you’ve heard that you can brighten your mood just by faking a smile. But that idea, which came out of a psychological experiment from the 1980s, may not be true after all, as scientists were not able to repeat the results in a lab setting in a large, rigorous new study. The hypothesis, called the facial-feedback hypothesis, dates back to a 1988 study in which participants rated the humor of cartoons while inadvertently mimicking either a smile or a pout. The participants were simply asked to hold a pen in their mouths, either with their lips (which pushes the face into a frown-like expression) or their teeth (which mimics a smile). The participants who used the pen to mimic a smile rated the cartoons as funnier. Now, a 17-lab effort with 1,894 participants finds no evidence that such an effect exists. It’s the latest in a string of failed replications in psychology, including the recent finding that willpower may not be a limited resource, as many psychologists had believed. The failure of an idea to hold up in a replication study, however, rarely settles the question of whether or not a result is valid. The originator of the facial-feedback hypothesis, psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg in Germany, argued that the replication study changed enough of his original experiment so that it no longer was a true replication. [Smile Secrets: 5 Things Your Grin Says About You] “Now, I’m not sure what we’ve learned [f...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news