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Can smiling make you happier?

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Re: Can smiling make you happier?

#14

Post by SubiculumCode »

sandworm101 wrote: post #4

Forced 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 "According to Natsume, this atmosphere sometimes causes women to smile unnaturally for so…

The 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.

Re: Can smiling make you happier?

#15

Post by PieterH »

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.

Re: Can smiling make you happier?

#16

Post by meric »

PieterH wrote: post #15

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 yo…

It's the underlying, intrinsic, emotional connection, rather than the extrinsic muscle movements.

On intrinsic goods: 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.

Re: Can smiling make you happier?

#17

Post by Chinjut »

matthoiland wrote: post #8

It seems this article is more about research techniques over the years than it is about smiling.

Yes, 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").

Re: Can smiling make you happier?

#18

Post by sowhatquestion »

Was 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.

Re: Can smiling make you happier?

#20

Post by bootload »

Interesting 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/

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