Weekly Roundup: Smiling and Seeing Happiness, Men and Women’s Brains, Sleep and Memory, Smelling Your Way to Better Health

Weekly roundup of fascinating research into the brain and mind

This post was first published on my substack

As usual it is always a strain to decide on which research to report on with so much being published — let’s stick this week with themes I’ve reported on previously and let’s start with happy stuff:

Smiling

There was a legendary study conducted many years ago (in 1988 by Fritz Strack to be precise) that seemed to prove that involuntary smiling seemed to improve mood (or finding cartoons funnier — to be precise). This was a big thing at the time seemingly proving that body and brain are more interconnected than most had assumed at that time. Indeed this was an amazing proposition and lapped up by students of psychology, and others, the world over.

However, over the years many of these classic psychological experiments have failed to be replicated — this is the so-called replication crises. This includes that classic experiment which was subject to a large-scale replication of said smiling experiment — with disappointing results.