It may be an age-old saying that makes most people groan whenever a friend or family member feels the need to say it, but there are actual psychological benefits that come from simply putting on a smile. Researchers have been examining this phenomenon for a few decades now and even though it is not a new age, 21st century discovery, it is nonetheless amazing and unexpected. One would intuitively assume that facial expressions are an external representation of what is going on inside the brain. Classically, facial expressions are considered to be influenced by mood and thought. It seems to be a one-way street in which the brain controls the face, but this is not the case.

Charles Darwin hypothesized that emotional facial expressions are an innate and universal human characteristic. A happy face is a happy face no matter where you are in the world. This theory has been thoroughly explored and psychologists have produced evidence that supports this century-old speculation. This is convenient in a way, because if facial expressions were specific to a geographic region, people would have to learn faces as if they were learning a new language. What a challenge that would be! But the more interesting aspect to these universal facial expressions is that the physical expression can directly influence one’s emotions.

Studies on this finding were approached in multiple ways. One study conducted at Clark University in Worcester, MA instructed patients to move certain parts of their face in various ways, such as raising the eyebrows or relaxing the mouth, and then reporting their emotions. (The patients were not told that the study had anything to do with emotion.) In another study performed by a group of German researchers, patients were told to clench a pen in their front teeth, creating a smile, or hold the pen in their protruding lips, creating a pout, and then report their emotional state. In these studies, patient’s emotions were consistent with the resulting facial expression. So, it can be inferred from these findings that making a happy face can help make you happy. It must be noted that changing facial expression is not a means of changing one’s whole state of mind. Certainly someone who is mourning cannot just put on a smile and instantly be cured of all sadness. It is not that simple. It is more realistic to think that facial expression can influence emotion, not directly change it. We would all be in for quite a roller coaster ride of emotion if the opposite were true, and a rapid change of facial expression was able to instantaneously change our moods.

If this finding is valid then there must be some physical explanation or neural substrate to explain it. Even though researchers observed this phenomenon decades ago, a full explanation is yet to be obtained. There are a number of hypotheses, though. Many incorporate the brain’s limbic system, and specifically the hypothalamus – areas of the brain known to control emotional processes. The hypothalamus plays a role in the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is responsible for many subconscious functions of the peripheral nervous system such as breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. From a physiological standpoint, it is hypothesized that a change in facial expression is able to change patterns of blood flow to limbic structures, therefore influencing one’s emotional state. There are researchers both supporting and refuting this theory, and a more concrete explanation is yet to be found. But the fact remains, put on a smile and your day may get a little brighter.

Sources:

A Feel-Good Theory: A Smile Affects Mood – NY Times

Facial expressions and the regulation of emotions – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Facial Expression and Emotion - American Psychologist

In Justin Bieber’s 2010 smash hit ‘U Smile’ he addresses the idea that when “You smile I smile”, obviously deriving his inspiration from recent work by V.S. Ramachandran on the human mirror neuron system. Over 50 years before Justin Bieber’s efforts to bring Ramachandran’s research to the forefront of the media, Dale Carnegie noted in his 1936 masterpiece, How To Win Friends And Influence People, the undeniable positive effects of smiling on the people around you. Carnegie goes on to explain how smiling can actually have a positive affect on the smiler as well. He notes a passage written by the great psychologist William James:

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go
together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more
direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which
is not.”

The idea of positive feedback in biological systems was first outlined fully by Norbert Wiener in 1948 during his extensive work in cybernetics. Simply, the process can be described as “A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A.” Most of us would agree that as we experience more positive emotion we tend to smile more. The type of smiling that is caused by positive emotion is real smiling, or Duchenne smiling. This Duchenne smiling uses mouth and eye muscles and can be contrasted to “fake” smiling, where only the mouth muscles are active. That being said, from the logical sequence above if we describe A as “positive emotion” and B as “Duchenne smiling” we can see that as we feel more positive emotions we tend to smile more, which in turn makes us happier, thus restarting the circuit described by William James and Dale Carnegie.
Since there are two forms of smiling, one “fake” form where only the mouth muscles are activated and one “real” or “Duchenne” form where the eye muscles are also activated, is it the activation of the eye muscles that causes the positive feedback to the brain? In that case, are we happier on sunny days, as we have to squint to compensate for the amount of light? This idea that the eye muscles are the key to the feedback circuit could then be drawn out into multiple other hypotheses: Is it possible that people with poor vision enjoy reading more simply because they have to squint leading to the “glasses equals nerd” stereotype? When we are focused on some sort of game, do we squint merely to evoke more positive emotion?
For the past couple of weeks, upon finding myself dozing off in class or simply uninterested in what is being discussed on the blackboard, I have just squinted while trying to understand what is being explained. To be honest, it does help with both emotion and concentration. Maybe it’s worth a try? And if your “first love broke your heart for the first time” as in the case of pop god Justin Bieber, try giving a genuine Duchenne smile. Everyone knows that a good short-circuiting of the body’s pleasure system is fun once in a while.

Additional Reading:

How To Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie

V.S. Ramachandran on Mirror Neurons – Ted.com