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Having to fake a smile to feel slightly happy is fairly depressing to me.
Because that's what makes the depression happen.
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 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.
Having to fake a smile to feel slightly happy is fairly depressing to me.
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…
It likely means there's no inner emotional effect from just the specific measured physical activation of facial muscles.
Part of the problem here is, as they say, that we don't know why it failed to replicate. I saw Strack and Martin's complaints in part at least as finding that to be a concern:
Maybe there genuinely is no effect, or maybe the effect they originally measured is down to something subtle that was different due to all the changes in the experimental setup.
Personally I think that's a big flaw in the replication attempt: They ought to have at least included a couple of groups that followed the original setup as closely as humanly possible, to see whether that would give different results.
In any case, they were measuring something very specific: Whether forcing subjects to put their facial muscles into something resembling a smile while they are unaware of being made to smile will cause them to subsequently be more likely to judge a comic funny.
Can that can be extrapolated to the question of whether smiling will make you happier? Maybe. Maybe not.
Is it relevant to situations where people decide to smile with the intent of trying to force an emotional change? No idea.
Is it relevant to situations where people realise that they have been smiling without knowing why? No idea.
Is it relevant to situations where forcing a smile triggers social feedbacks that affect your emotions (e.g. people smiling back)? Probably not at all, but who knows.
It's very possible that the failure to replicate genuinely means the original result was flawed, without it actually telling us anything about typical real world situations that people wrongly interpreted the original paper to apply to.
This is perhaps a bigger problem: The original finding has been spun so much over the years into something it was not. They specifically tried to "engineer away" peoples knowledge about whether or not they were smiling or of someone trying to affect their emotional state. And that's fine for their original purpose, but it's not very relevant to most of the situations that people have subsequently tried to apply the spun version of the results to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
I don't think this is quite the same as forcing yourself to smile for yourself.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I understand where you're coming from. It's a form of confirmation bias. But for me as long as it works for me I'm fine with it. Scientific results be damned. Science serves man, not the other way around.
Having to fake a smile to feel slightly happy is fairly depressing to me.
It's depressing to live under influence of societies impression/marketing that being happy is all it matters and to continuously chase it. Because that's what makes the depression happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Down 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 sm…