When a person feels happy, he smiles. But the opposite is also true, according to a new scientific study: if someone intentionally “wears” a smile, by mobilizing facial muscles appropriately, they can improve their mental mood. In other words, the smile-mood relationship is a two-way street.

Researchers from the Many Smiles Collaboration, led by psychologist Nicholas Coles of Stanford University in California, who published a corresponding publication in the journal Nature Human Behavior, conducted experiments with almost 3,900 volunteers from 19 countries, who were randomly divided into three groups and asked to have a smiling, neutral or spontaneous expression.

It was found that those who then put a smile on their face, mimicking the smiling faces in the photo, subsequently reported that they experienced a greater improvement in mental mood.

For years, psychologists have debated whether facial expressions, even those made consciously rather than spontaneously, affect one’s emotions and moods. A new study shows that this is indeed the case. The dressed smile effect, according to the researchers, is not strong enough to overcome something as strong as depression, but it is enough to make someone feel better.

“We experience emotions so often that we forget how amazing this ability is. But without emotion there is no pain, no pleasure, no unhappiness, no happiness, no tragedy, no glory in the human condition. “The new research tells us something fundamentally important about how emotional experience works,” Coles said.

Psychologists are still not sure about the origin of emotions. One theory is that the conscious experience of emotions is based on bodily sensations, i.e. that the feeling of a rapid heartbeat “translates” as a feeling of fear.

RES-EMI