How Smiling Can Backfire

Scientific American:

If you’re reading this at a desk, do me a favor. Grab a pen or pencil and hold the end between your teeth so it doesn’t touch your lips. As you read on, stay that way—science suggests you’ll find this article more amusing if you do. Why? Notice that holding a pencil in this manner puts your face in the shape of a smile. And research in psychology says that the things we do—smiling at a joke, giving a gift to a friend, or even running from a bear—influence how we feel.

This idea—that actions affect feelings—runs counter to how we generally think about our emotions. Ask average folks how emotions work—about the causal relationship between feelings and behavior—and they’ll say we smile because we’re happy, we run because we’re afraid. But work by such psychologists as Fritz Strack, Antonio Damasio, Joe LeDoux shows the truth is often the reverse: what we feel is actually the product, not the cause, of what we do. It’s called “somatic feedback.” Only after we act do we deduce, by seeing what we just did, how we feel.

Read the whole story: Scientific American