- U-Report
VIVA – The question of whether pretending to smile can make people feel happier has been debated since Charles Darwin published a book on the subject in 1872. Charles Darwin said that free expression is born of emotion, and can evoke it in the mind.
"Free expression with outward signs of an emotion amplifies it. Even emotional simulations tend to evoke it in our minds," Darwin wrote.
In 2019, a review of 138 studies found that smiling does affect people's emotions, but the effect is small. Now, researchers have recruited thousands of people from around the world to test the effects of a smile.
In the study published in Nature Human Behavior, about 3,800 volunteers from 19 countries were asked to smile or maintain a neutral expression using several different cues and then rate their happiness.
Ilustrasi tersenyum.
- U-Report
Researchers pretended to study how small movements and distractions affected math-solving abilities and issued instructions such as “put your left hand behind your head and blink your eyes once per second for 5 seconds.”
For one of these tasks, volunteers had to place a pen between their teeth or hold it with their lips, according to the Science Alert website, Monday, October 24, 2022.
In the second task, the volunteers imitated a photo of an actor smiling or maintaining a blank expression. Then, in the third task, researchers asked participants to show happy expressions by moving the corners of their lips toward their ears and lifting their cheeks or maintaining a blank facial posture.
With each task completed, participants completed a simple math problem, happiness and anxiety questionnaire, and an anger, fatigue, and confusion survey to obscure the purpose of the study.
"Consistent with previous meta-analyses, these results suggest that facial feedback can not only amplify ongoing happy feelings but also initiate happy feelings in a neutral context," the researchers wrote.
