Smiling may not always make you happier, and new research suggests that forcing yourself to smile repeatedly could actually make you feel worse. In a University of Florida study involving more than 1,100 participants, researchers discovered that while a single artificial smile can provide a small mood boost, repeatedly faking smiles can erase that benefit or even reverse it.
I suspect any customer service rep. could have told us that.
That’s an interesting bit of research.
I’ve always had the pet hypothesis that fake smiles suck over time because it’s a lie. Most people, when they lie, have a dissonance. It’s a small scale self violation. You know it’s fake, you know that sustaining the effort is going to make things harder on you, and you have that feeling that everyone can tell you’re faking it.
That’s a big load to carry on a regular basis. Like the article says (and the research it’s about said), short term gains are possible because you can fake it til you make it up to a point. But the more consequences for failure to pass as real pile up, and the more you have to fake, the more dissonance there is. And dissonance is a very harsh stressor to deal with.
I just have one of those faces. People come up to me and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ Nothing. ‘Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.’ Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?
Bill Hicks
Embrace instead the amazing, healthy and therapeutic effects of screaming at others to fuck off.
https://laurentian.scholaris.ca/items/1fe04823-d12c-420d-8b72-c1b582fdf91e
Did we not learn this from Inside Out?
I don’t need your cheap tricks. I can be miserable all on my own.
My mother was telling me to smile since elementary “to release good brain chemicals”. Reading this the thought crossed my mind that growing up was one big customer service job to keep my parents happy.
Ah, so that’s why bosses want you to smile the whole time.
File this under No Shit, Sherlock.
Faking positive emotions really needs to be driven out of cultural expectation.
But USians were arguing with me just some days ago that forced smiles make them cheery.
I wouldn’t consider this common sense at all. Growing up, I was always taught that faking a smile can produce dopamine and legitimately make you happier.
It’s good that things like this actually get researched.
This. ⬆️
No Shit, Sherlock. I’m surprised it needed a study.
It’s really important to study the obvious things. Most provide evidence of things we knew so we can be confident, and some prove common sense wrong and improve our understanding of the world.
I thought everyone realized this. Its funny how I have always hated a forced smile so i don’t do it. For that I get told I’m not a good person.
I’ll teach you to be happy!
I’ll teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
Believe it or not, there is a middle ground here.
Sucking one egg?
Masking always makes me feel worse, so there’s that.
It sucks when the paint comes off with it.
Yeah but you’re so much prettier when you smile, sweetheart.
isn’t that a reason to avoid it?
And yet sitting in my car practicing sinister maniacal Joker laughs is some of the best fun I ever have.
