Perhaps you have ever asked yourself this question: ‘Am I happy because I smile or am I smiling because I am happy?’ Psychology has tried to find out, beyond mere reflection, how much truth there is in both directions of emotion, and a new study by Chinese researchers seems to have found a curious finding.
It is quite intuitive to think that, when people feel good, without important worries and in good spirits, we have a certain more or less general tendency to show a smile. But the one that has raised the most doubts has been the question of whether the simple gesture of smiling makes us feel better . Checking this out was the goal of Jingjing Chan and his collaborators, who analyzed the brain activity of 20 people under two different conditions using brain MRI. The first group had to hold a pen only with the teeth (facilitating the activation of the muscles that move with the smile) while the second had to hold the pen only with the lips (inhibiting the muscles of the smile)
In the first place, spontaneous brain activity was analyzed and it was observed that when holding a pen only with the teeth, there were changes in the activity of areas related to the onset of emotions and the control of attention.
In a second experiment, brain activity was analyzed during an emotion recognition task in photographs (where participants had to decide whether the face they saw had an expression of joy or sadness). The analyzes showed that there were changes in the brain activity of areas that are related to the imitation of expressions and to emotions (such as the parietal lobe, the supplementary motor area and the median cingulate) when the posture maintained by the face when holding the pen influenced the recognition of emotions in photos.
These results, published in Biological Psychology (2014), show that our motor acts, at a very basic level, can also influence our emotions. In these times, it may be a comfort to know that feeling a little better is in our power, so, smile and you will feel happier, at least cerebrally speaking.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
