Who would like to improve his mood a little, you can try a simple Trick. “Try to Smile more,” says Nicholas Coles from the University of Tennessee. “Studies show that a happy facial expression can actually cause us to feel a little bit happier.”
The question of whether facial expressions can influence emotions, was among psychologists has long been debated. Many doubted the so-called Facial Feedback hypothesis. The scepticism was reinforced when a few years ago, a team of researchers, it failed to repeat the results of a well-known Smile experiment.
“We didn’t want to leave us but on the results of individual studies,” says Coles. “Psychologists investigate the influence of facial expressions on feelings already since the early seventies. Therefore, we have looked at all of the results to the subject.”
138 study with 11,000 participants
In your Research, the researchers came across 138 studies from almost five decades, in which more than 11,000 people had participated. The results suggest that the Facial-Feedback-wrong hypothesis, albeit with restrictions.
So, for instance, people find Cartoons funnier when you smile while Watching. Also to emotional sentences, you respond with some feeling, her face expressing the appropriate Emotion – whether happiness, anger or sadness. The measured effects, however, were generally low, as the researchers in the journal “Psychological Bulletin” reports.
A painted Smile alone is not enough to find the way to happiness, says Coles. However, the scientist sees that the results are an important step. “You give an impression of how body and mind interact with each other,” he says. “But we must still learn a lot about how this effect comes about.”
In addition to the Facial-Feedback hypothesis also evidence that body posture can affect the mind exist. As researchers have observed in recent years that a more upright posture, improves mood, and awake. A crooked back, however, deteriorates the results, according to the mood and makes it more prone to frustration.
