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By Robert Preidt
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, April 11, 2019 (HealthDay News) – Here's something that will make you smile: By returning this, scientists feel a little happier, the researchers conclude.
Although most of us know this instinctively, academics have not always been certain.
"Conventional wisdom tells us that we can feel a little happier if we simply smile, or that we can get in a bad mood if we growl," said principal investigator Nicholas Coles, a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Toronto. University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
"But psychologists have disagreed on this idea for over 100 years," Coles said in a press release.
The controversy around the theory has intensified in 2016 when 17 teams of researchers have not been able to replicate a well-known experiment that claimed to show that a smile can make people happier.
A much larger data pool was needed, said Coles.
"Some studies have not shown that facial expressions can influence emotional feelings," he 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."
Coles and his colleagues analyzed nearly 50 years of data from 138 studies that looked at whether facial expressions could affect people's moods. Studies have involved more than 11,000 people worldwide.
The researchers' conclusion: facial expressions make to have a small effect on feelings: the smile makes people happier, the frown makes them more angry and frowning make them sadder.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
Coles pointed out that no one should launch his antidepressants and start smiling instead.
"We do not think people can smile at happiness," he said. "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. "
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