3 ms·

Sigh. 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

by PieterH 10y ago

Sigh. 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 ago
It'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 ago
  I 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.

by PieterH 10y ago

meric 10y ago

It'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 ago
I 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.