Smiling More Often May Trick Your Brain into Feeling Happy

Akshay Naik 28 August 2020

It may be a cliché to say, ‘When smile, the whole world smiles with you’, but there appears to be some truth in this old adage. According to new research from the University of South Australia (UniSA), the simple act of smiling can trick the mind into being more positive.

This study, published in the journal Experimental Psychology, evaluated the impact of a ‘covert’ smile on the perception of facial and body expressions. In both scenarios, a smile was induced by participants holding a pen between their teeth, forcing their facial muscles to replicate the movement of a smile.

The results revealed that facial muscular activity not only alters the recognition of facial expressions but also body expressions, with both generating more positive emotions.

"When your muscles say you're happy, you're more likely to see the world around you in a positive way," Dr Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, the lead researcher and artificial cognition expert from UniSA says. “In our research, we found that when you forcefully practice smiling, it stimulates the amygdala—the emotional centre of the brain—which releases neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state.”

Dr Marmolejo-Ramos also expressed that the findings of his study have important insights for mental health. He explained, "For mental health, this has interesting implications. If we can trick the brain into perceiving stimuli as 'happy', then we can potentially use this mechanism to help boost mental health."

To conclusively reinforce its findings, the study replicated the ‘covert’ smile experiment evaluating how people interpreted a range of facial expressions (spanning from frowns to smiles) while using the pen-in-teeth mechanism. The researchers then extended this to using point-light motion images, spanning sad walking videos and happy walking videos, as the visual stimuli.

Dr Marmolejo-Ramos believes that there is a strong link between action and perception. "In a nutshell, perceptual and motor systems are intertwined when we emotionally process stimuli. A 'fake it 'til you make it' approach could have more credit than we expect,” he says.

Although the COVID pandemic might not have given us much to smile about, being happy and walking around with a smile on our faces does appear to pay dividends, according to this research.

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