Psycho and sexo
Happiness could be a state of mind. In any case, several researchers have studied the question.
What if making things happen is the key to being happy? Thus, in 1988 researchers had already proven that smiling could influence our mood. To achieve these results, they had two groups of participants read a comic strip. The first group of people performed the test with a pen stuck between their teeth, forcing them to smile. While the individuals of the second group held the pencil between their lips making them pout. A study that is still taught in many psychology courses today, but is it still relevant today?
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In 2016, other researchers questioned this theory. In a study published in the journal Psychological Sciences, 17 laboratories reproduced the same methodology used in the 1988 study on a sample of nearly 1,900 students. And it seems that the results obtained this time do not confirm those obtained 28 years earlier.
A real impact
Faced with these new results, scientists continued to wonder about the impact of smiling on the body. In 2019, new work published in Psychological Bulletin have relied on 50 years of research to attempt to answer the question once again definitively. ” Common sense tells us that we can feel a little happier with just a smile. But psychologists have disagreed on this idea for over 100 years. They’ve been testing this idea since the early 70’s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence. Says Nicholas Coles, principal investigator of the study at the University of Tennessee.
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To carry out this research, the scientists relied on information from 138 studies carried out on more than 11,000 participants from around the world. At the end of their work, they came to the conclusion that facial expressions can indeed have a slight impact on the emotions we feel. Likewise, frowning could put us in a more negative psychological state. ” We don’t believe that people can achieve happiness just by smiling. But these findings are exciting because they provide a clue to how the mind and body interact to shape our conscious experience of emotions. We still have a lot to learn about these facial feedback effects, but this meta-analysis has given us a better understanding of how emotions work. », Continued the researcher.
In the end, smiling may well make us feel better. So the next time you’re down and force yourself to take a more positive attitude, you might just be surprised.