Our story begins in the mid 1800s, when French scientist Guillaume Duchenne studied our emotional
expressions by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents.
He isolated which muscles are behind our expressions of terror, sadness and joy.
While many muscles in our face can simulate a smile, only two produce a genuine smile--one
under our eyes and another on the side of our cheeks.
It looks like your eyes are smiling too.
Psychologists call this a “Duchenne smile”.
Joy and happiness makes us genuinely smile, but can smiling make us genuinely happy?
Inspired by Duchenne’s work, Charles Darwin suggested that our facial movements influence
our emotional experiences--there’s a feedback loop so looking scared would make you more
fearful and a genuine smile would make you happy.
It’s called the facial feedback hypothesis.
Skip forward a century and American psychologist Paul Ekman monitored the smiles of a group
of women while they watched a series of movies.
Those who smiled genuinely (a Duchenne smile) and moved those muscles near their eyes reported
feeling significantly more amused and happier than those who didn’t smile.
So he came to the astonishing conclusion that we smile when we're happy.
In a more recent study, one group of participants received botox treatment for frown lines,
which paralysed the corrugator muscles in their brow.
The participants couldn’t express sad or distressed emotions in their face, and their
reported positive mood was significantly higher than other participants who received different
cosmetic procedures.
Aside from genuine smiles and frown-muscle paralysis, there’s hope for our fake smiles
too.
One study found that when participants were asked to fake a smile while completing a stressful
activity, they had lower heart rates during a stress recovery period than those asked
to maintain a neutral expression.
So forcing yourself to smile can make you happier.
It goes to show that if you grin and bear it, it’s more likely your sadness and stress
will help to hibernate your worries away.
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