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Fake it till you make it — or so the saying goes. That means things like act confident, even if you don’t feel it, until you feel confident. When it comes to mood, and happiness, there has long been the advice of “just smile, it will make you feel better”. With the assumption that the movement of smiling will trigger a host of knock-on effects. Makes sense, right?
Yes, it does make sense, but, it has been difficult to prove. This also is the history of a legendary study published in 1988 which involved having participants watch a video with a pencil between the teeth, forcing the mouth into a sort of grin (the smiling scenario), or holding the end between the lips to form the mouth into a “pout, a more negative facial expression.
The hypotheses was that the pencil pushing the mouth into this involuntary smile or pout could and would impact impressions of how amusing the participants judged the videos they were watched, and also their mood.
Strack et al. did indeed find a correlation and so it was deemed proven that forcing a smile will make you feel better. That is until it fell, and fell heavily, to the replication crises in psychology.
The replication crises, for those who don’t know, was the realisation that many studies in psychology couldn’t be replicated. So, if another researcher repeated…
