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.
I was very concerned there, but for more than one reason.
He started out volunteering to replicate the study and also helping the researchers out a LOT with the experimental re-set-up. Then, when his research is found to be suspect, he starts to throw doubt on it.
Or at least that is what the news article author wrote. Both groups, the new author and the researchers, have incentive to recast what the results of the re-do say. One to sell ads, the other, it is implied, to keep tenure or something, I dunno.
Looking at the redo, there are many good reasons the original researchers have to continue to say their research may be 'good' still. Reasons that the rest of the field entertains and to some extent, believes.
Still, to your point that they may think it is impossible to replicate: That means that no real research occured in the first place. If they are seriously arguing, as the news author implicates, that a research team cannot ever replicate a study, they what they are doing is not 'science' or even psuedoscience. There then is NO POINT to doing any of the research in the first place. If you can't prove an effect, even with large errorbars or something, then you are wasting your life and the money of others.
> that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling.
It likely means there's no inner emotional effect from just the specific measured physical activation of facial muscles.
Part of the problem here is, as they say, that we don't know why it failed to replicate. I saw Strack and Martin's complaints in part at least as finding that to be a concern:
Maybe there genuinely is no effect, or maybe the effect they originally measured is down to something subtle that was different due to all the changes in the experimental setup.
Personally I think that's a big flaw in the replication attempt: They ought to have at least included a couple of groups that followed the original setup as closely as humanly possible, to see whether that would give different results.
In any case, they were measuring something very specific: Whether forcing subjects to put their facial muscles into something resembling a smile while they are unaware of being made to smile will cause them to subsequently be more likely to judge a comic funny.
Can that can be extrapolated to the question of whether smiling will make you happier? Maybe. Maybe not.
Is it relevant to situations where people decide to smile with the intent of trying to force an emotional change? No idea.
Is it relevant to situations where people realise that they have been smiling without knowing why? No idea.
Is it relevant to situations where forcing a smile triggers social feedbacks that affect your emotions (e.g. people smiling back)? Probably not at all, but who knows.
It's very possible that the failure to replicate genuinely means the original result was flawed, without it actually telling us anything about typical real world situations that people wrongly interpreted the original paper to apply to.
This is perhaps a bigger problem: The original finding has been spun so much over the years into something it was not. They specifically tried to "engineer away" peoples knowledge about whether or not they were smiling or of someone trying to affect their emotional state. And that's fine for their original purpose, but it's not very relevant to most of the situations that people have subsequently tried to apply the spun version of the results to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The placebo effect is a real thing that actually has benefits. In this particular case, even if smiling is purely placebo, all is well because a smile is free (of charge and of adverse side effects).
But in the case of many medicines, just because magic-miracle-pill-x "works for you" doesn't really mean its a good idea if it actually only works due to placebo: maybe its really expensive (for something that may as well be just sugar) or maybe there is actual medication that is much more effective or maybe its safety hasn't been fully studied as is the case with much alternative medicine.
In any case, Hitchens's razor applies:
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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?
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.
By depression, I assume you mean sadness? Existential angst? Because if someone found smiling could curtail depression I'm sure they'd win the Nobel prize.
I thing it's evident that smiling can make a ratty external situation more humorous, but for internal darkness it's like bottling things up, which I'm surprised psychologists might have thought to be a good idea.
Yep. In my experience, external factors such as smiling, laughing, joking and being active are completely disconnected from and have no bearing on someones internal emotional state when depressed.
That is, in my personal experience and in my experience knowing others who have suffered from depression, you can feel completely down and hopeless and emotionally distraught without this being visible to those around you, who simply see you being active, acting happy, smiling, joking and so on. These things do not mean that you aren't depressed. The thing that makes depression what it is, is the feeling of hopelessness and/or emptiness even when these other things are present and even when there's seemingly no reason for it.
Many depressed people get very good at bottling up and hiding their emotions.
> if someone found smiling could curtail depression I'm sure they'd win the Nobel prize.
You're reading way too far into that. If something brings you from -100 to -95 it's notable but not world-changing. yamike didn't say anything about actually fixing the depression, just adding a slight bit of happiness.
> I think it's evident
Are you basing that on anything? There's a reason we're actually doing this study and not just reasoning out the answer.
You don't think it's evident people smile to make others feel more comfortable? (Sounds like a question in an Autism checklist)
And on the other side of the coin: You don't find it rather ironic that you discount experiential self-reporting in this thread, yet psychology relies on it so heavily?
>You don't think it's evident people smile to make others feel more comfortable? (Sounds like a question in an Autism checklist)
That is not what the post I replied to said, and I especially want a citation for the "bottling things up" portion.
>You don't find it rather ironic that you discount experiential self-reporting in this thread, yet psychology relies on it so heavily?
I don't see any irony once we remove the oversimplifications. It's a terrible data source so we need a whole lot of data points and careful collection to get anything meaningful. We can still use it, but we very much need to discount single anecdotes and going by what's 'evident' without checking.
Bottling things up, with regards to depression -- pretending to be what you are not -- is exhausting. If you don't have depression exhaustion can be overcome. A big part of depression is the inability to recover from stress, therefore pretending to smile, over time, would be obviously detrimental to depression. I know this from experience.
The studies on depression and stress are many and numerous, although they are neuroscientific in nature (actual science).
No offence dude, but the field of psychology is to neuroscience as alchemy is to chemistry and physics. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
PS: Psychology has done a pretty good job of getting depression wrong at every possible turn. And people like me have been the butt of their half-baked ideas since the beginning. gives psychology the middle finger
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"
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.
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.
"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."
There is a difference between a forced smile and a genuine smile. There are a different muscles at play.
If you force a laugh, you'll see muscle movements similar to a genuine smile. A forced smile tends to just use the muscles below the nose.
When you test the difference, observe your emotions. Mindfulness is helpful here but I observe a genuine, immediate difference. Perhaps this can be explained by forces other than "fake it til you make it" but it works for me so I can reuse it when I need to. Now I know that a potential placebo effect means it's as good sugar water but sometimes sugar water is all you need to lift your spirits - a little better than rum and cola.
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.
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.".
The smiling oppressed sex slave may indeed be happier than the frowning oppressed sex slave, but the frowning self empowered wealthy woman is likely happer than either the smiling or frowning opressed sex slave...on average.
Down vote is interesting. I was using an example to illustrate the fallacy of the grandparent's argument, and apparently the choice of 'sex slave' as an example of a bad situation someone might find themselves in left a bad taste. Maybe, however the point was that just because someone might be miserable in a bad job that requires forced smiles doesnt mean that the forced smile doesnt have a positive effect, just a smaller effect than the o e associated with having a bad job.
The choice of "sex slave" as an example of a bad situation isn't why you're getting downvoted. You're getting downvoted because, in context, you seem to be labeling customer service representatives, models, sales associates, waitresses, and strippers as "sex slaves". You should blame yourself for that, not your audience; the inference is conventional, and is plausible in large part specifically because those are jobs that call for smiling. (Though even more so for models and strippers.)
ah. That was quite unintentional. I was using extremes to make a point, not to associate the two separate examples. However I can see how some might arrive to that inadverent conclusion.
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.
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").
Please don't make unfair generalizations about the HN community. The "crowd" includes you, and we ask that you comment substantively just as we do of everyone else.
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.
> Smiling as such does not make us feel happier. That is trivially proven, just as pretending to cry does nit make us sadder.
It may be trivially proven, but there's been decades of research hinting that the opposite was true, and took a major replication project to give the first published indication it isn't.
In the end, we probably know that it's not as simple as the original research indicated (indicating smiles can change your mood), but the replication setup differed from the original research in many ways, and we don't know why it failed to replicate. Maybe the effect does't exist, or maybe the changes affected the outcome. Or maybe the fact that this is a very famous experiment may have affected the outcome (though in that case one might have expected the effect to get stronger?)
I wouldn't be surprised if the effect isn't real, but I won't be surprised if people get other results with different tweaks to the method either - they are trying to measure emotional effects from small physical changes. If they truly do exist, then it's not that odd if they are fickle in terms of experimentation setup when psychologists have to invent all kinds of elaborate schemes to "trick" subjects to try to exclude effects caused by experimentation stup.
E.g. in this case they were trying to prevent people from knowing that they were trying to get them to smile, to measure whether just the physical act of putting your mouth in that shape will make you happier.
It's important to consider that both the original paper and the attempted reproduction is explicitly not measuring whether you deciding to force a smile makes you happier or not, or if you putting your mouth into a smile for unknown reasons and recognising that you are smiling will make you happier or not.
Whether or not the original paper or the replication attempt are right, it's a very narrow finding, that does not address your statement.
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.