Grimacing Or Smiling Can Make An Injection Feel Less Painful

By Emma Young If you’re preparing to receive a flu vaccine — or even a COVID-19 vaccine — this winter, you’ll be interested in the results of a new study that investigates whether it’s better to smile or grimace your way through the pain of an injection. The idea that manipulating our facial expressions can affect our emotions has a long and storied history. There are many advocates of this “facial feedback hypothesis”, and many critics, too. Indeed, one of the classic findings in the field — that people find cartoons funnier if they hold a pen between their teeth, inducing a smile — recently failed to replicate. This mixed research background was well known to Sarah D. Pressman and Amanda M. Acevedo at the University of California, Irvine, who led the new work, published in Emotion. The team randomised 231 student participants to hold either a neutral expression, a regular smile (which involves the cheek muscles), a Duchenne smile (which also recruits muscles by the eyes, resulting in creasing around the eyes) or a grimace (which recruits both these sets of muscles, plus those which allow us to wrinkle our brows). To induce these expressions, the participants (who thought they were taking part in an investigation of multi-tasking) were given chopsticks to hold in one of four positions between their teeth, and asked to imitate an example photo. Each participant then held their assigned facial position while they received an injection...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Faces Source Type: blogs