Smiling might cheer you up once, but being forced to do it over and over can leave people less happy than before, a new study suggests.
The research, led by Nicholas Coles, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, was published recently in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Coles has spent years studying whether facial expressions affect mood, and his earlier work backed the idea that smiling helps. His own job history tells a different story.
“I used to work in customer service. I actually got written up for my inability to keep smiling at work at an unnamed theme park in Florida,” Coles said in a statement. “So I’m looking at all this evidence I had accrued so far that smiling boosts happiness and realizing it flies in the face of my own experiences in the world.”
Working with UF student Annabel Dang and researcher Joao Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi, Coles ran an online experiment recruiting 1,201 people, with 1,174 included in the final analysis. Participants looked at either pleasant pictures, like kittens and flowers, or upsetting ones. Some were told to smile, while others reacted naturally.
Within the category of participants who were asked to smile, some were asked to smile just once, while others had to repeat the forced smile 10 times. Additionally, half the participants were told they could lose $2 of their $6 payment if they didn’t smile convincingly, though everyone was ultimately paid in full.
“We also controlled the number of times they have to do it, because in customer service, every interaction is another faked smile,” Coles noted.
Breaking down the data
The findings revealed a clear split: a single smile while looking at unpleasant images gave people a small boost in happiness. Repeating the smile, however, weakened that boost. Adding the threat of losing the promised money wiped it out altogether.
With the pleasant images, meanwhile, forced smiling that was repeated or tied to a penalty actually left people less happy and more irritated than those who didn’t have to smile.
“If you only force a smile once without any financial penalties, you can see the improvement in happiness,” Coles explained. “But when you make it a little bit more like the real world, where you have to keep repeating it, and if you don’t do it well, you get financial penalties, you see it completely reverse.”
According to the researchers, the results raise questions about workplace rules that require employees to smile at customers, like a policy Target was criticized for.
“As a society, we have placed such an immense amount of emphasis on trying to make ourselves feel happier than we currently are,” Coles said, adding that there is “much less emphasis on just being content with what we have.”
Sources: University of Florida, ScienceDirect, SciTechDaily