Any, even an insincere smile will help to cope with stress
Last reviewed: 28.11.2021
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Psychologists have confirmed the wisdom that a smile helps to overcome difficulties, with the only difference that, according to the research, any, even insincere grimace will help you to cope with stress anyway.
Wisdom advises any troubles to endure with a smile. But is there any real effect behind this? That is, is a smile capable of driving a bad mood and helping to cope with stress?
To find out, psychologists from the University of Kansas (USA) invited more than one and a half hundred volunteers to participate in the next experiment. Each of them was taught two types of smile - a standard one, in which only the muscles of the mouth participate, and the "real" or "sincere" or "Duchenne smile", in which the muscles around the eyes are also occupied. The peculiarity of the training was that the subjects were forced to make a smiling face with the help of chopsticks. This, at first glance, a strange condition allowed psychologists to avoid the word "smile": some subjects just constructed a certain expression on their faces, not knowing what should happen in the end.
After all learned how to manipulate the face, the test came on. Assignments were associated with stress, about which the participants of the experiment were not warned. Tests were offered multitasking, and among them, for example, there were also those when it was necessary to lower the hand into ice water. Performing tasks, the subjects kept on the face this or that expression: neutral, standard smile, sincere smile; in this they were helped by the sticks, which fixed the corresponding expression. At the same time, they measured the heart rate and were interested in subjective feeling of stress.
It turned out that a smile really improves our physical condition: those who smiled sincerely suffered less from stress than those whose face expressed a standard smile. (Here we note once again that the differences between the "sincere" smile and the "standard" smile are purely anatomical in this case: they differ in the mechanics of the facial musculature.) But what is really interesting is that people who simply performed certain manipulations with their own face that they did not speak openly, that they as a result should fix a smile, suffered from stress a little more strongly, than those who about a smile knew. However, the difference was not very significant.
In other words, the grimace of a smile really helps to cope with the difficulties (how exactly - the question is already addressed to neurophysiologists). So smile as often as possible, even if you do not feel joy. Just do this mimicry - and you will be happy.
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