‘Smile like you mean it’ – an emotion regulation strategy?
Posted on Jan 29, 2010 by Eleanor Miles
“Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike… the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (William James, 1890)
William James famously thought that emotions were reactions to bodily states – an idea which has definitely become less popular since the 19th century. While it’s clear that emotions are not all in our heads (we all recognise that anger is associated with frowning, sadness is associated with crying, etc), most theories now view the bodily components of emotion as a later-occurring part of the emotional experience, rather than the earliest part. Maybe as a reflection of this, physiological measures have become increasingly popular in studies on emotion and emotion regulation, and while we can’t use someone’s skin conductance or their facial expressions to tell us exactly what they are experiencing, we can get a pretty good idea of whether that person is feeling positive or negative (see 1 for a review).
The aim of this blog, though, is to consider whether the relationship between emotions and the body might be two-way. Emotions influence the body – but can the body also influence emotions?
A good place to start is research on the ‘facial feedback hypothesis’ (2), which suggested that our facial expressions influence our emotional experience. Asking people to copy facial expressions like smiling or frowning does make them report feeling slightly more positive or negative (3), but this isn’t great evidence for a body-emotions link – if participants are aware they’re being asked to make an emotional expression, it’s possible that they might consciously try to change their emotions in order to do a good job of it. To get around this, experimenters have come up with ingenious ways of getting participants to make different facial expressions without realising it has anything to do with emotion. For example, if participants hold a pen sideways between their teeth (producing muscle action similar to smiling), as opposed to holding the pen between their lips like a lollipop, they rate cartoons as being funnier (4). Apparently, you don’t even need to go to the effort of moving your own muscles to get this effect – lifting peoples’ cheeks up and sticking them there with bandages, oddly enough, seems to make them happier (5).
Other actions associated with emotions have similar effects. Asking participants to sit in an upright posture, rather than slumped over, makes them feel prouder (6). Making a fist makes men feel more powerful (7). Extending your middle finger makes you interpret other people’s behaviour as more hostile, but sticking up your thumb makes you view those people more positively (8). Nodding the head, as compared to shaking it, makes people rate stimuli more positively (9). In one study, an experimenter put a pen in front of participants while they were either nodding or shaking their heads (in order to ‘test out some headphones’). Later, they were offered the same pen or given the choice to swap for a different one. Participants who had been nodding preferred to keep the same pen, while those who had been shaking their heads preferred to swap (10).
These studies suggest our bodies can influence both our emotions and our emotional evaluations of objects in our environment. What’s more, the effects occurred despite the fact that the participants in these studies had no idea their actions were related to emotions. What’s the explanation for this?
It seems that the actions these participants performed had a priming effect on their emotions. Priming refers to the activation of concepts or goals outside a participant’s awareness, which then unconsciously influence behaviour. A good example of priming is a study by Bargh, Chen and Burrows (11), in which participants were primed with the concept of ‘elderly’ (by asking them to complete a wordsearch containing words like old, grey, and retired). The participants who had been primed walked more slowly than the control participants when leaving the room after the experiment , and they didn’t realise that they were doing this, or why it happened – in other words, priming the concept of ‘elderly’ had an unconscious effect on their behaviour.
The studies discussed earlier also seem to involve priming – performing an emotion-relevant action seems to automatically prime the related emotion. This suggests that the motor, sensory, and affective components of each emotion are linked, so that activating one component activates the others. An intriguing explanation for this process is that our sensory, motor and affective experiences of an emotion might be our representation of that emotion. While most cognitive theories view representations as abstract symbols, ‘grounded cognition’ theories suggest that emotions (and other concepts) are represented in modality-specific systems (see 12 for a review). In this view, when we think about an emotion, we are partially activating the same sensory, affective, motor and physiological components that were involved in experiencing it – and this same re-activation also occurs when the emotion is primed, whether it’s by making an emotion-related facial expression or by seeing someone else experience the emotion.
This process of ‘simulation’ might also be key to our understanding of other people’s emotions. We know that seeing other people experience an emotion activates motor and somatosensory areas of our brain, as well as affective ones (13), and studies have shown that our understanding of emotions is worse if we are blocked from simulating them. People are worse at recognising others’ emotions if they are prevented from moving their face to mimic the emotions (14), and slower to judge the valence of emotional sentences if the emotion doesn’t match their own facial expression (15). This suggests that simulation is a necessary part of emotional processing – one which might underlie phenomena such as empathy, emotional contagion, and unconscious mimicry.
Overall, it seems that our bodies aren’t just a way for us to express what we’re feeling - they actually play a causal role in our experience and understanding of emotions. What might this imply for emotion regulation?
Maybe ‘response-focused’ emotion strategies, which target behaviour or facial expressions, have the potential to be more effective than we currently think. Studies have generally found that suppressing the expression of emotion isn’t a very effective downregulation strategy – in other words, keeping a straight face while you’re watching a disgusting film won’t make you feel much less disgusted. However, it’s possible that ‘embodying’ an emotion you aren’t feeling could help to upregulate mood – maybe if we want to feel happier, we should try standing up straighter and smiling a bit more. It also seems wise for psychologists not to forget that the minds we’re studying exist in bodies which have an automatic and unconscious influence on their emotions.
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