Psychologists find that smiling can really make people happier

Smile can really make people happier, according to a new article published in Psychological Bulletin.

Co-authored by researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Texas A & M, the paper examines nearly 50 years of data to test whether facial expressions can make people feel the emotions associated with these expressions.

"Conventional wisdom tells us that we can feel a little happier if we simply smile, or that we can put ourselves in a more serious mood if we growl," said Nicholas Coles, UT Ph.D. and principal investigator on paper. "But psychologists have disagreed on this idea for over 100 years."

These disagreements escalated in 2016, when 17 teams of researchers failed to replicate a well-known experience demonstrating that the physical act of smiling can make people happier.

"Some studies have not found evidence that facial expressions can influence emotional feelings," Coles said. "But we can not focus on the results of a single study – psychologists have been testing this idea since the early 1970s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence."

Using a statistical technique called meta-analysis, Coles and his team combined data from 138 studies that tested more than 11,000 participants worldwide. According to the results of the meta-analysis, facial expressions have little impact on feelings. For example, the smile makes people happier, the frown makes them angry and frowning makes them sad.

"We do not think people can smile at happiness," said Coles. "But these results are exciting as they provide a clue to how the mind and 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 brings us a little closer to understanding how emotions work. "