Using electrical stimulation to force yourself to smile can lift your mood

Using electrical stimulation to force yourself to smile can lift your mood

Written by Rachel Nuwer

The expression, “If you smile every day, you won’t feel depressed” may have some validity beyond the realm of greeting card messages. The question of whether smiling or frowning enhances or suppresses emotions has been around for decades and is still hotly debated.

In a new study, researchers sought a more definitive answer by using electrical muscle stimulation to literally force people to smile or frown by curling the corners of their mouths up and down. They found evidence that the physical act of making such expressions appears to directly influence a person’s emotions, making them more positive or negative.

The idea that the body plays a role in shaping how we feel and perceive the world is “old and interesting,” says David E., a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex in the UK, and lead author of the published study. Author Sebastian Korb says: in emotions. “But that’s not universally accepted,” Korb said.This new study suggests that facial movements seem to influence emotion, and this long-standing, but controversial states that it adds evidence to a certain hypothesis. .

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The role that facial expressions play in influencing human emotions was explained by Charles Darwin and the philosopher and psychologist William James, who both hypothesized that physiological changes in the body could influence emotions. It has roots in the 19th century. In the 20th century, researchers began to focus on the effects of facial expressions, and in the 1970s this idea was formally described as the “facial feedback hypothesis.”

In the decades since then, this hypothesis has received mixed empirical support. In 1988, German researchers published a study known as the pen task. They divided participants into two groups and asked them to manipulate a pen with their mouths in different ways. Both groups held the pen straight, perpendicular to their lips, but one group held the pen between their teeth to help create a smile-like expression, while the other group held the pen straight, perpendicular to their lips. I closed my mouth and held it between my lips to make a kissing look. Participants then ranked how humorous a series of cartoons were. People who extended their mouth into a smile found the cartoon more interesting than people who made a kiss-like facial expression, which the researchers interpreted as evidence supporting the facial feedback hypothesis.

However, this famous study was called into question in 2016 when a team of researchers, including Korb, attempted to replicate the study results in 17 laboratories, with each lab conducting the study on more than 100 participants. carried out. In contrast to the original study, the researchers’ results did not reveal significant evidence supporting the facial feedback hypothesis.

“Some people said we should forget about the hypothesis altogether,” Korb says. “On the other hand, there were people like me who said, ‘Wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.'” I started wondering if I could find other ways to manipulate the muscles in the way that they were.”

In the new study, Kolb and colleagues focused on electrical stimulation. This is a method that allows you to stimulate specific facial muscles for a specific amount of time. They placed electrodes on the skin of 58 participants and gradually increased the electrical current, causing contractions that caused their faces to grimace or smile. Due to anatomical variation between participants, the level of electrical current received to activate the target muscles varied slightly between participants.

Each participant was exposed to several experimental conditions multiple times for 5 seconds. Smile looking at happy images such as beautiful beaches. We frown at depressing images of beaches full of trash. They also performed the same set of experiments with weaker stimuli that produced no visible movements in the participants’ facial muscles. After exposure to each condition, participants ranked how positive or negative they felt.

Across all measurements, the researchers found a correlation between participants’ facial features and how they felt, but not when exposed to weak stimuli. There was no change in mood at that time. The strongest correlation occurred when smiling and positive imagery were combined. But even in the absence of an accompanying image, participants ranked their mood lower when their facial muscles were forced to frown and higher when their facial muscles were stimulated to smile. did. As for the findings without images, “the effect wasn’t that large,” Korb said. “But remember, we are already putting ourselves in a situation where it is not clear whether it is having an effect or not because we are only activating a particular muscle for five seconds and very little. ”

Heather Wrench, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the study, said the study was successful and “opens up a new way to induce facial expressions.”

Korb and his colleagues said they now have preliminary confirmation that the method works and are planning additional studies. Future research could explore how activating different muscles in the face makes people feel, and use brain waves to determine how quickly the brain responds emotionally to those changes. There is a possibility that Is it really the activity of facial muscles that influences emotions, or are study participants simply aware that their facial muscles are active?That got me thinking about facial muscles. He added that more research is needed to answer the more difficult question of whether there are only these. corresponding emotion.

Lenzi added that Korb et al.’s findings may have practical applications. “If there is a fairly strong relationship between muscle activation and emotion, this research could have interesting applications, for example, if people could use wearable devices to self-stimulate their muscles and change their emotional state. “You can do that,” she says. “The health, ethical and social implications of this type of application are very interesting.”