Fake it 'til you make it?

[tcepsa]

Pretty much everyone knows that your physical bearing tends to reflect your inner state. If you're sad or hurting you tend to probably try to shrink in on yourself to form a smaller target, hunching up your shoulders and lowering your head. If you're proud you probably throw your shoulders back and hold your head high. If you're happy, you probably smile.

Research seems to indicate that the physical/inner state connection goes both ways; that if you're feeling sad and you smile, it will help you feel happier. If you could use a little self-confidence, stand up taller and lift your chin. Your brain goes "Oh! We're standing like this now, so we must be feeling better!" These strategies seem to work for me (when I remember to try them ;). However, I've also talked with people who firmly believed it wouldn't work for them, and who refused to fake it.

While reading about another bit of research on smiles today, something clicked. The research that I was looking at basically said that it is not true that a smile is a smile is a smile. We all probably intuitively know this; how many of us have grinned stoically through the taking of a photograph that we didn't really want to be a part of (or looked at a picture and thought, "Wow, even though they're smiling that person looks like they'd rather be enduring a root canal")? Fake smiles generally only engage one set of muscles, the ones that pull the corners of the mouth back and up. These are ones that people have a great deal of control over, so they can easily fake a smile that far. However, there are other muscles that get engaged automatically in a genuine smile, such as a set that pulls up the cheeks and causes the skin at the outer corners of the eyes to wrinkle into "laugh lines".

It is possible to develop control over those muscles as well, but most people do not engage them when they are forcing a smile. I wonder whether the people who have told me that it doesn't work for them to smile in order to brighten their mood are only using the first set. That would explain why it doesn't really work for them. Their brains go, "Oh, this is just a fake smile, we're not really happy, we're faking" and make them feel phony instead of happy. It would be interesting to see whether they got different results if they used all of the smiling muscles...

Comments

[blushing-grace.livejournal.com]

Stage smiles are 'real' smiles and you do that while you're on stage (or at least I do/did when I was dancing) ... maybe that's one of the reasons joy is associated with performing?

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

That seems entirely plausible ^_^

[sucsays.livejournal.com]

David Sedaris's "Santa Land Diaries" is a chronicle of his days working as an elf in the NYC Macy's Santa Land. One of the major functions of Santa Land was to generate revenue from photos taken with Santa. In one part, he discusses how some children, usually toddlers and the like, when they finally got to the picture-taking part, would cry either because Santa freaked them out or because they were so damn cranky from the hour long wait in the line. He tells how some parents, also cranky at this point, force their children to smile and take then photo ("Goddamnit, Caitlin, you'd better get up on that man's lap and smile or I'll give you something to cry about"). He says those photos are just tragic.