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Can smiling make you happier?
- nate_martin 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- ionised 10y agoI swear somebody posts this link in every thread with a question.
- sandworm101 10y agoForced smiles making you more happy? Talk to anyone in in-person customer service. Talk to a model or "sales associate". Talk to a waitress, or even a stripper. There are plenty of people who force smiles all day. It isn't fun. They don't feel better about themselves afterwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_mask_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_mask_syndrome "According to Natsume, this atmosphere sometimes causes women to smile unnaturally for so long that they start to suppress their real emotions and become depressed."
- duaneb 10y agoI don't think this is quite the same as forcing yourself to smile for yourself.
- AstralStorm 10y agoThe forced part is. If you actually choose to smile, then it is not forced, right? I'd like to meet a person who actually can "smile for themselves" most of the time.
- Retra 10y agoAs soon as you've decided to do something about being unhappy - even if it's just smiling - it's reasonable to think you'll be at least a slight bit happier.
- kristofferR 10y agoYeah - most people probably doesn't just think "I'm not feeling great, so I'll force my facial muscles to create a smile". Instead they are likely thinking "Hey, what am I bitching about, things aren't so bad. I have lots of things in my life to smile about, so let's do it.".
- jwdunne 10y agoThere is a difference between a forced smile and a genuine smile. There are a different muscles at play. If you force a laugh, you'll see muscle movements similar to a genuine smile. A forced smile tends to just use the muscles below the nose. When you test the difference, observe your emotions. Mindfulness is helpful here but I observe a genuine, immediate difference. Perhaps this can be explained by forces other than "fake it til you make it" but it works for me so I can reuse it when I need to. Now I know that a potential placebo effect means it's as good sugar water but sometimes sugar water is all you need to lift your spirits - a little better than rum and cola.
- vidarh 10y agoAnd this is a big problem with reading too much into the original result or the replication: They're not measuring forcing yourself to smile for yourself, or even forcing yourself to smile for someone else. They're measuring being tricked into shaping your mouth like a smile without being aware that you're doing it. That may be interesting and and of itself, but whether or not intentionally forcing a smile has an effect is an entirely separate question.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoThe smiling oppressed sex slave may indeed be happier than the frowning oppressed sex slave, but the frowning self empowered wealthy woman is likely happer than either the smiling or frowning opressed sex slave...on average.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoDown vote is interesting. I was using an example to illustrate the fallacy of the grandparent's argument, and apparently the choice of 'sex slave' as an example of a bad situation someone might find themselves in left a bad taste. Maybe, however the point was that just because someone might be miserable in a bad job that requires forced smiles doesnt mean that the forced smile doesnt have a positive effect, just a smaller effect than the o e associated with having a bad job.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoThe choice of "sex slave" as an example of a bad situation isn't why you're getting downvoted. You're getting downvoted because, in context, you seem to be labeling customer service representatives, models, sales associates, waitresses, and strippers as "sex slaves". You should blame yourself for that, not your audience; the inference is conventional, and is plausible in large part specifically because those are jobs that call for smiling. (Though even more so for models and strippers.)
- SubiculumCode 10y agoah. That was quite unintentional. I was using extremes to make a point, not to associate the two separate examples. However I can see how some might arrive to that inadverent conclusion.
- j2kun 10y agoA relevant post on slate star codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psychology/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psycholo...
- Geee 10y agoWhat is the answer? I'm not going to read the whole thing.
- matthoiland 10y agoIt seems this article is more about research techniques over the years than it is about smiling.
- Chinjut 10y agoYes, absolutely. It seems very few people commenting here actually read the article or are responding to it, beyond the title chosen here on Hacker News (which isn't even the title displayed on the article! The article's displayed title is "Sad Face", while the URL title is, in full, "Can Smiling Make You Happier? Maybe, Maybe Not; We Have No Idea").
- pcunite 10y agoSmile awhile And give your face a rest Raise your hand to the one you love the best, Then shake hands with those nearby, And greet them with a smile!
- pcunite 10y agoTo those who down voted me ... try smiling ...
- AstralStorm 10y agoYou do not control minds over the Internet.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rezashirazian 10y agoHaving to fake a smile to feel slightly happy is fairly depressing to me.
- yamike 10y agoFeeling slightly happy is better than being totally depressed.
- cairo_x 10y agoBy depression, I assume you mean sadness? Existential angst? Because if someone found smiling could curtail depression I'm sure they'd win the Nobel prize. I thing it's evident that smiling can make a ratty external situation more humorous, but for internal darkness it's like bottling things up, which I'm surprised psychologists might have thought to be a good idea.
- Dylan16807 10y ago> if someone found smiling could curtail depression I'm sure they'd win the Nobel prize. You're reading way too far into that. If something brings you from -100 to -95 it's notable but not world-changing. yamike didn't say anything about actually fixing the depression, just adding a slight bit of happiness. > I think it's evident Are you basing that on anything? There's a reason we're actually doing this study and not just reasoning out the answer.
- cairo_x 10y agoYou don't think it's evident people smile to make others feel more comfortable? (Sounds like a question in an Autism checklist) And on the other side of the coin: You don't find it rather ironic that you discount experiential self-reporting in this thread, yet psychology relies on it so heavily? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_inventory#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_inventory#Problems
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- PieterH 10y agoSigh. People seem to always forget that we're a social species and a lot of our emotions have social roles. Smiling as such does not make us feel happier. That is trivially proven, just as pretending to cry does nit make us sadder. Thinking of happy things can make us feel happier, and thus we may smile. But what makes us happiest of all is when other people smile at us (without being creepy). And so if I smile at you , and you smile back, then I will absolutely feel happier.
- meric 10y agoIt's the underlying, intrinsic, emotional connection, rather than the extrinsic muscle movements. On intrinsic goods: http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/intrinsic.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/intrinsic.html P.S. As a side irrelevant note, I think in the future, for the protection of humanity, any strong AI must be built with a desire for intrinsic goods.
- jacalata 10y ago> trivially proven Apparently not. Did you not read the article?
- PieterH 10y agoI didn't, sorry. :( Poor excuse, it was 4am and I was half awake.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 10y ago> Smiling as such does not make us feel happier. That is trivially proven, just as pretending to cry does nit make us sadder. It may be trivially proven, but there's been decades of research hinting that the opposite was true, and took a major replication project to give the first published indication it isn't. In the end, we probably know that it's not as simple as the original research indicated (indicating smiles can change your mood), but the replication setup differed from the original research in many ways, and we don't know why it failed to replicate. Maybe the effect does't exist, or maybe the changes affected the outcome. Or maybe the fact that this is a very famous experiment may have affected the outcome (though in that case one might have expected the effect to get stronger?) I wouldn't be surprised if the effect isn't real, but I won't be surprised if people get other results with different tweaks to the method either - they are trying to measure emotional effects from small physical changes. If they truly do exist, then it's not that odd if they are fickle in terms of experimentation setup when psychologists have to invent all kinds of elaborate schemes to "trick" subjects to try to exclude effects caused by experimentation stup. E.g. in this case they were trying to prevent people from knowing that they were trying to get them to smile, to measure whether just the physical act of putting your mouth in that shape will make you happier. It's important to consider that both the original paper and the attempted reproduction is explicitly not measuring whether you deciding to force a smile makes you happier or not, or if you putting your mouth into a smile for unknown reasons and recognising that you are smiling will make you happier or not. Whether or not the original paper or the replication attempt are right, it's a very narrow finding, that does not address your statement.
- sowhatquestion 10y agoWas anyone else disturbed by Strack and Martin's hand-waving away the null replication result? Based on my (admittedly elementary) knowledge of statistics, it seems like 17 replication attempts (samples) whose means are distributed around zero constitute some pretty airtight empirical evidence that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling. How else to read Strack and Martin's complaints but as a kind of special pleading that there was something ineffable about the experiment that the replications missed? Some of their comments gesture in the direction of claiming that replication may be literally impossible. I walked away from this article more convinced than ever that there are big problems with this field of research. And I don't "want" to believe it, either -- I loved Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Speaking of which, kudos to Kahneman himself for being (apparently) a more committed empiricist than the other psychologists discussed here.
- Balgair 10y agoI was very concerned there, but for more than one reason. He started out volunteering to replicate the study and also helping the researchers out a LOT with the experimental re-set-up. Then, when his research is found to be suspect, he starts to throw doubt on it. Or at least that is what the news article author wrote. Both groups, the new author and the researchers, have incentive to recast what the results of the re-do say. One to sell ads, the other, it is implied, to keep tenure or something, I dunno. Looking at the redo, there are many good reasons the original researchers have to continue to say their research may be 'good' still. Reasons that the rest of the field entertains and to some extent, believes. Still, to your point that they may think it is impossible to replicate: That means that no real research occured in the first place. If they are seriously arguing, as the news author implicates, that a research team cannot ever replicate a study, they what they are doing is not 'science' or even psuedoscience. There then is NO POINT to doing any of the research in the first place. If you can't prove an effect, even with large errorbars or something, then you are wasting your life and the money of others.
- galaxia2 10y agoYou are trying to intellectualize this too much. We simply tried an experiment. We smiled while we are feeling neutral or down. Voila! Emotion becomes positive after a while. Physiology affects psychology, and psychology affects emotions. Evidence is truth.
- postmeta 10y agoReading hackernews and smiling can make you happier. /gratuitous
- bootload 10y agoInteresting question. This week it was reported that Gene Wilder passed away. Yet if you look at most photos he is smiling and as I look at them I cannot but help feel positive. Why? "The interesting part is that mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves." [0] Is something to do with mirror neurons (not mentioned at all in the article), that govern our ability to mimic at the neuron level? These effects can be measured at cellular level without having to have a subject self report. There is ample evidence reported in Nature on both the mechanism and evidence supporting the idea that viewing of emotion cues in others, effects your own emotional response. [0] Sourya Acharya,Samarth Shukla, "Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/
- yitchelle 10y agoThat is a great observation. If I look in the mirror every morning and smile at myself, I should feel better on two counts. 1) I'm similing 2) I see someone similing. I will try this out in the morning.
- ultramancool 10y agoIf I recall correctly they've had major issues duplicating studies which got positive results on this.
- known 10y ago"You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun" --Al Capone
- barking 10y agoIt got him all the way to the state penitentary, take that you dirty rat, BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
- mirimir 10y agoSmiling doesn't make me happy. But noticing when I'm prompting myself to be unhappy always makes me smile :)
- Animats 10y agoThe title needs work. The original title "Another Classic Psychology Finding—That You Can Smile Your Way to Happiness—Just Blew Up" is more appropriate. If you can't replicate results, it's not science. Deal with it.
- jdimov10 10y agoJust about everyone on HN seems permanently depressed. The HN crowd can not be bothered to smile because they're too busy moaning about "social injustice". I keep trying to push myself extra hard to only read the headlines and never click on the comments...
- sctb 10y agoPlease don't make unfair generalizations about the HN community. The "crowd" includes you, and we ask that you comment substantively just as we do of everyone else.
- warbaker 10y agoThis follows the standard rule of questions as article titles: the answer is "probably not."
- jamesthebold 10y agoWhenever i laugh after happiness come.