Smiling doesn't make me happy. But noticing when I'm prompting myself to be unhappy always makes me smile :)
Can smiling make you happier?
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#32Forced 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…
I don't think this is quite the same as forcing yourself to smile for yourself.
There 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.
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#33The 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.
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#34Was 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…
You 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.
If you expect that X will make you happy, and do X, most people will report being happier for a while. That's true no matter what X is. It could even be frowning, let's say "to use up the negative emotions" or whatever. That by itself is not evidence that X does anything.
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#35Sigh. 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…
> trivially proven
Apparently not. Did you not read the article?
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#36Sigh. 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…
[deleted]
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#37Having to fake a smile to feel slightly happy is fairly depressing to me.
Feeling slightly happy is better than being totally depressed.
By 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.
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#38Interesting 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…
That 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.
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#39"You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun" --Al Capone
It got him all the way to the state penitentary, take that you dirty rat, BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Re: Can smiling make you happier?
#40Sigh. 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…
> trivially proven Apparently not. Did you not read the article?
I didn't, sorry. :( Poor excuse, it was 4am and I was half awake.