Smile because we are lost! – This is what psychologists and our friends the scholars say…

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Psychologists are still not sure about the origin of emotions

When one feels happy, one smiles. But, according to a new scientific research, the opposite is also true: if someone deliberately “wears” a smile, mobilizing the muscles of their face accordingly, they can improve their mental mood. In other words, the smile-mood relationship is a two-way street.

Researchers from the Many Smiles Collaboration, led by psychologist Nicholas Coles of Stanford University in California, who made the relevant publication in the Journal of Human Behavior “Nature Human Behavior”experimented with nearly 3,900 volunteers from 19 countries, who were randomly divided into three groups and asked to have smiling, neutral, or spontaneous expressions.

It was found that those who had then “put on” a smile on their face, imitating smiling faces in a photograph, reported afterwards that they showed a greater improvement in their mental mood.

For years, psychologists have argued over whether facial expressions, even those that one makes consciously rather than spontaneously, affect one’s emotions and mood. The new study shows that this is indeed the case. The effect of the “dressed” smile, according to the researchers, is not strong enough to overcome something as strong as depression, but it is enough to make someone feel better.

“We feel emotions so often that we forget how amazing this ability is. But without emotion there is neither pain nor pleasure, neither misery nor happiness, nor tragedy nor glory in the human condition. “The new research tells us something fundamentally important about how emotional experience works,” said Coles.

Psychologists are still not sure about the origin of emotions. One theory is that the conscious experience of emotions is based on bodily sensations, e.g. that the feeling of an accelerated heartbeat is “translated” as a feeling of fear.

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