Emotions and Facial Expressions
We all know that emotions give our lives meaning, and life without emotions is impossible to imagine.
This is why Dr. Matsumoto describes emotions as immediate, involuntary, automatic, and unconscious reactions to things that are important to us.
Emotions help us react in some situations with minimal conscious awareness and are triggered by a universal, underlying psychological theme.
When triggered, they recruit an organized system of reactions that produce specific physiological signatures, direct our cognitions, and produce specific types of feelings.
Importantly, emotions produce specific, nonverbal behavior in the face, voice, and body.
Different emotions are expressed by different, specific, unique facial configurations (facial expressions) that are universal to all cultures, regardless of race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender or any other demographic variable.
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
If emotions produce specific universal facial expressions, can facial expressions in turn affect your emotions? According to the facial feedback hypothesis definition, they can.
But is this actually true?
Scientists have been interested in the idea of a facial feedback hypothesis since the 1800s (Source: Betterhelp) and modern researchers have continued to study the hypothesis to this day.
Smiling is Good for Your Heart
One facial feedback study conducted by clinical psychologists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman showed the smiling benefits. Turns out, smiling is good for your heart in stressful situations.
For their study, the researchers examined participants’ heartbeats, since stress and heart health are related.
17o participants were split into 2 groups: one knew what the study was about, while the other didn’t.
In the training stage, the researchers taught the volunteers how to either hold their faces in a neutral expression, hold a social smile (upper right hand image), or hold a Duchenne smile (upper left hand image).
The researchers monitored the participants’ heart rates as they performed various tasks; both groups were required to use their hand to quickly trace a star reflected in a mirror, followed by placing their hand in a bucket of ice water for one minute.
While completing these tasks, each person had to hold chopsticks in their mouth which activated muscles corresponding to a forced smile.
They found the participants who were instructed to smile, and in particular those whose faces expressed genuine or Duchenne smiles, had lower heart rates after recovery from the stress activities than the ones who held their faces in neutral expressions.
Even the volunteers who held chopsticks in their mouths, that forced the muscles to express a smile (but they had not explicitly been instructed to smile), had lower recovery heart rates compared to the ones who held neutral facial expressions.
Interestingly, those who smiled genuinely during the trial recovered the fastest, followed by people with fake (social) smiles. Those with neutral smiles had the slowest recovery.
Smiling Improves Moood
Recent research also suggests that fake or social smiling can make people feel happier.
An international collaboration of researchers led by Stanford University research scientist Nicholas Coles published a study in Nature Human Behavior.
As part of the Many Smiles Collaboration, a total of 26 research groups from 19 different countries and over 3,800 participants were involved. The average age of the participants was 26 and over 70% were women.
The researchers created a plan that included three well-known techniques intended to encourage participants to activate their smile muscles:
- One-third of participants were directed to use the pen-in-mouth method
- One-third were asked to mimic the facial expressions seen in photos of smiling actors
- The final third were given instructions to move the corners of their lips toward their ears and lift their cheeks using only the muscles in their face
In each group, half the participants performed a small physical tasks and simple math problems while looking at cheerful images of puppies, kittens, flowers, and fireworks, and the other half simply saw a blank screen.
They also saw these same types of images (or lack thereof) while directed to use a neutral facial expression. After each task, participants rated how happy they were feeling.
After analyzing their data, the researchers found a noticeable increase in happiness from participants mimicking smiling photographs or pulling their mouth toward their ears.
Interestingly, the researchers didn’t find a strong mood change in participants using the pen-in-mouth technique but the evidence from the other two techniques was clear.
It provided a compelling argument that human emotions are somehow linked to muscle movements or other physical sensations.