
Can smiling make you happier? - nate
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/08/can_smiling_make_you_happier_maybe_maybe_not_we_have_no_idea.html
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sowhatquestion
Was anyone else disturbed by Strack and Martin's hand-waving away the null
replication result? Based on my (admittedly elementary) knowledge of
statistics, it seems like 17 replication attempts (samples) whose means are
distributed around zero constitute some pretty airtight empirical evidence
that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling. How else to read Strack
and Martin's complaints but as a kind of special pleading that there was
something ineffable about the experiment that the replications missed? Some of
their comments gesture in the direction of claiming that replication may be
literally impossible.

I walked away from this article more convinced than ever that there are big
problems with this field of research. And I don't "want" to believe it, either
-- I loved Kahneman's _Thinking, Fast and Slow_.

Speaking of which, kudos to Kahneman himself for being (apparently) a more
committed empiricist than the other psychologists discussed here.

~~~
galaxia2
You are trying to intellectualize this too much. We simply tried an
experiment. We smiled while we are feeling neutral or down. Voila! Emotion
becomes positive after a while. Physiology affects psychology, and psychology
affects emotions. Evidence is truth.

~~~
Dylan16807
If you expect that X will make you happy, and do X, most people will report
being happier for a while. That's true no matter what X is. It could even be
frowning, let's say "to use up the negative emotions" or whatever. That by
itself is not evidence that X does anything.

~~~
galaxia2
I understand where you're coming from. It's a form of confirmation bias. But
for me as long as it works for me I'm fine with it. Scientific results be
damned. Science serves man, not the other way around.

~~~
Dylan16807
If you have something that works for you, great. But don't confuse that with
the actual question the study is trying to ask, which is knowledge about how
emotions work. The result doesn't tell you what to do, but it's irrelevant to
what you do. Don't damn it, just leave it to the people that are interested in
that question for other reasons.

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j2kun
A relevant post on slate star codex:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-
psycholo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psychology/)

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rezashirazian
Having to fake a smile to feel slightly happy is fairly depressing to me.

~~~
paganel
And to a lot of us who live in Europe. Was reading a thread on reddit the
other day about how people in the States actually tell you to smile, even
though they're total strangers to you. What if just someone close to you just
passed away? What if you've just been fired and don't have money for rent or
for your parents' medication?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
None of that matters, honestly. The expectation is more that you go out of the
house with a happy face. If you work at a store or in other customer service
fields, it isn't enough to be nice and polite, you need to smile as well. I
worked in a call center and we got told that we should smile while on the
phone, even.

And sometimes, the order to smile is some odd sort of thing men do to women,
especially older men to younger women.

All of it becomes habit.

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bootload
Interesting question. This week it was reported that Gene Wilder passed away.
Yet if you look at most photos he is smiling and as I look at them I cannot
but help feel positive. Why?

    
    
        "The interesting part is that mirror 
         neurons fire in the same way when we 
         actually recreate that action ourselves." [0]
    

Is something to do with mirror neurons (not mentioned at all in the article),
that govern our ability to mimic at the neuron level? These effects can be
measured at cellular level without having to have a subject self report. There
is ample evidence reported in Nature on both the mechanism and evidence
supporting the idea that viewing of emotion cues in others, effects your own
emotional response.

[0] Sourya Acharya,Samarth Shukla, "Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical
modular brain"

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/)

~~~
yitchelle
That is a great observation. If I look in the mirror every morning and smile
at myself, I should feel better on two counts. 1) I'm similing 2) I see
someone similing. I will try this out in the morning.

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pcunite
Smile awhile

And give your face a rest

Raise your hand to the one you love the best,

Then shake hands with those nearby,

And greet them with a smile!

~~~
pcunite
To those who down voted me ... try smiling ...

~~~
AstralStorm
You do not control minds over the Internet.

------
mirimir
Smiling doesn't make me happy. But noticing when I'm prompting myself to be
unhappy always makes me smile :)

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sandworm101
Forced smiles making you more happy? Talk to anyone in in-person customer
service. Talk to a model or "sales associate". Talk to a waitress, or even a
stripper. There are plenty of people who force smiles all day. It isn't fun.
They don't feel better about themselves afterwards.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_mask_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_mask_syndrome)

"According to Natsume, this atmosphere sometimes causes women to smile
unnaturally for so long that they start to suppress their real emotions and
become depressed."

~~~
duaneb
I don't think this is quite the same as forcing yourself to smile for
yourself.

~~~
AstralStorm
The forced part is. If you actually choose to smile, then it is not forced,
right?

I'd like to meet a person who actually can "smile for themselves" most of the
time.

~~~
Retra
As soon as you've decided to do something about being unhappy - even if it's
just smiling - it's reasonable to think you'll be at least a slight bit
happier.

~~~
kristofferR
Yeah - most people probably doesn't just think "I'm not feeling great, so I'll
force my facial muscles to create a smile".

Instead they are likely thinking "Hey, what am I bitching about, things aren't
so bad. I have lots of things in my life to smile about, so let's do it.".

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warbaker
This follows the standard rule of questions as article titles: the answer is
"probably not."

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ultramancool
If I recall correctly they've had major issues duplicating studies which got
positive results on this.

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jamesthebold
Whenever i laugh after happiness come.

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Animats
The title needs work. The original title "Another Classic Psychology
Finding—That You Can Smile Your Way to Happiness—Just Blew Up" is more
appropriate.

If you can't replicate results, it's not science. Deal with it.

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matthoiland
It seems this article is more about research techniques over the years than it
is about smiling.

~~~
Chinjut
Yes, absolutely. It seems very few people commenting here actually read the
article or are responding to it, beyond the title chosen here on Hacker News
(which isn't even the title displayed on the article! The article's displayed
title is "Sad Face", while the URL title is, in full, "Can Smiling Make You
Happier? Maybe, Maybe Not; We Have No Idea").

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postmeta
Reading hackernews and smiling can make you happier. /gratuitous

------
known
"You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and
a gun" \--Al Capone

~~~
barking
It got him all the way to the state penitentary, take that you dirty rat,
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

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Geee
What is the answer? I'm not going to read the whole thing.

~~~
dominotw
Answer to any 'can X make you happier' is always yes.

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nate_martin
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
ionised
I swear somebody posts this link in every thread with a question.

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PieterH
Sigh. People seem to always forget that we're a social species and a lot of
our emotions have social roles.

Smiling as such does not make us feel happier. That is trivially proven, just
as pretending to cry does nit make us sadder.

Thinking of happy things can make us feel happier, and thus we may smile.

But what makes us happiest of all is when other people smile at us (without
being creepy). And so if I smile at you , and you smile back, then I will
absolutely feel happier.

~~~
jacalata
> trivially proven

Apparently not. Did you not read the article?

~~~
PieterH
I didn't, sorry. :( Poor excuse, it was 4am and I was half awake.

