September 06, 2009
Smile! It Could Make You Happier
From Scientific American:
We smile because we are happy, and we frown because we are sad. But does the causal arrow point in the other direction, too? A spate of recent studies of botox recipients and others suggests that our emotions are reinforced—perhaps even driven—by their corresponding facial expressions. Charles Darwin first posed the idea that emotional responses influence our feelings in 1872. “The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it,” he wrote. The esteemed 19th-century psychologist William James went so far as to assert that if a person does not express an emotion, he has not felt it at all. Although few scientists would agree with such a statement today, there is evidence that emotions involve more than just the brain. The face, in particular, appears to play a big role.
This February psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is compromised by cosmetic botox injections are happier, on average, than people who can frown.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:51 AM | Permalink
Comments
The logic of the explanation has some merit, but as far as I can tell without reading the original research paper (I'm not prepared to pay $50 for it), the researchers overlooked an important alternative hypothesis: namely, that those who could afford, or chose, botox injections were already "happier" than those who couldn't or didn't.
The only alternative hypothesis the researchers apparently considered (and discounted) was the possibility the injections made people feel more attractive and therefore happier.
Rather than selecting people who had already either received botox injections or not, the researchers would have been better to have administered botox to a randomly selected subset of their research subjects. But, I guess funding was a constraint.
Posted by: pohanginapete | Sep 6, 2009 3:34:32 PM
First: Who funded this research? Second: It completely perverts William James' thesis. James was concerned with what makes us human not what makes us happy. An inability to frown is cause of joy? Pathetic. A friend of mine worked in haircutting salon in a wealthy area and reported that plastic surgeries were talked about like one would talk about new restaurants. Yet, one of the patrons in private expressed sorrow when she was unable to empathize with her grandchild when the child frowned and she felt she couldn't take on that face. If there is such a thing as Dan Goleman's Emotional Intelligence then it's the researchers who are emotionally blind to the consequences of masking human feeling. This is the worst kind of science.
Posted by: Levity | Sep 7, 2009 11:02:44 AM
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