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Yes, Fake Smiling Does Improve Your Mood

Yes, Fake Smiling Does Improve Your Mood

by | 2022 Oct 27 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

Fake it till you make it – or so the saying goes. That means things like act confident, even if you don’t feel it, until you feel confident. When it comes to mood, and happiness, there has long been the advice of “just smile, it will make you feel better”. With the assumption that the movement of smiling will trigger a host of knock-on effects. Makes sense, right?

Yes, it does make sense, but, it has been difficult to prove. This also is the history of a legendary study published in 1988 which involved having participants watch a video with a pencil between the teeth, forcing the mouth into a sort of grin (the smiling scenario), or holding the end between the lips to form the mouth into a “pout, a more negative facial expression.

The hypotheses was that the pencil pushing the mouth into this involuntary smile or pout could and would impact impressions of how amusing the participants judged the videos they were watched, and also their mood.

Strack et al. did indeed find a correlation and so it was deemed proven that forcing a smile will make you feel better. That is until it fell, and fell heavily, to the replication crises in psychology.

The replication crises, for those who don’t know, was the realisation that many studies in psychology couldn’t be replicated. So, if another researcher repeated it, they got different results. Basically, if a study can’t be replicated then it kind of nullifies the whole experiment and subsequent results. And particularly worrying is that many of the most famous, most cited, and most popular studies seemed to be falling.

The pencil and smile one by Strack et al, was just such a study. Oft cited and much written about and spoken about by motivational speakers like I was. Not only could it not be replicated in different individual studies, but a global consortium ran 17 experiments with about 2’000 participants according to the same rigorous protocol while they were all videoed.

And what were the results?

Almost no effect. This seemed to wipe the smiling study off the plate. Psychologists were up in arms about the state of their science, and we all lost a favourite study to quote. But the story doesn’t end there. Strack himself had noted that a problem with the replication was that participants had been filmed during the experiment. And we all know that we tend to change our behaviour when observed. Could this be influencing the results?

Well, this is then what a group of Israeli researchers decided to investigate in 2018. And lo and behold what they found was precisely that: when filmed or unfilmed the results replicated both cases. There was an effect size almost identical to Strack’s original study when unfilmed, and similar to the follow up studies when filmed. Both studies are therefore correct.

That is a bit of history to understand the background to this particular experiment. And it now has a study to complement it. In this, however, sceptics and supporters for the smiling hypotheses came up with a protocol that they both agree would be more suitable. Holding a pencil between your teeth in a fake grin or to pout can be unwieldy, uncomfortable and unnatural.  Therefore, participants either mimicked a smile from an actor’s picture or pulled their lips towards their ears in a forced smile but also repeated the pencil in mouth technique. This was a large-scale study across 19 countries and with 3’878 participants.

And what did they find?

They found that the two conditions of mimicking a smile and forcing a smile were effective: “facial mimicry and voluntary facial action task could both amplify and initiate feelings of happiness”. So yes smiling, even if fake and forced, does make you feel happier.

And interestingly the pencil condition was hardly effective. This points to the original problem with Strack’s original research was that a pencil does not force the mouth into a natural smiling shape and therefore is not very effective at replicating the “smile to be happy” hypotheses.

So, that’s a long-winded way of saying – what many have assumed is correct all along:  yes, you can fake it to make it, and smiling will make you happier, whether forced, or fake.

So, keep smiling and if you are feeling down a fake smile will help!

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Nicholas A. Coles, David S. March, et al. 
A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration. 
Nature Human Behaviour, 2022
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01458-9

Original Study

Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988).
Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777. 
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.768

Failed replication

Wagenmakers, E.-J., Beek, T., Dijkhoff, L, et al.
Registered Replication Report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988).
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(6), 917–928.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616674458

Positive Replication

Noah, T., Schul, Y., & Mayo, R. (2018).
When both the original study and its failed replication are correct: Feeling observed eliminates the facial-feedback effect. 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(5), 657–664. 
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000121

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How Your Brain Decides to Help Others in Danger

How Your Brain Decides to Help Others in Danger

by | 2022 Oct 26 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

brain help emergency

In times of crises and danger we may hide and flee as our natural instincts would guide us, or do something else: put ourselves at danger and help others.

Whenever there is a tragic event, there abound stories of individuals who have helped others, often at great risk to themselves. But why? I don’t mean that negatively, it is great, and I have helped others in critical situations myself, a number of times actually.

What I mean is that the brain would normally, we assume, prioritise ourselves and seek to save ourselves first rather than instinctively help others. But the opposite seems to happen.

We may assume this is empathy, or moral standards, but recent research just published has shown this doesn’t appear to be the case!

Joana Vieira and Andreas Olsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have just published the intriguing results of a brain scanning study. They conducted a lab experiment in which 49 volunteers had their brains scanned while in a helping scenario.

Sorry, while in a brain scanner there is no running through fire to help others, ethical committees wouldn’t allow this anyway. But what they did do is give participants mild electrical shocks and they could avoid this and/or help others avoid this – virtually that is.

So far so good, but they manipulated the task by adding the risk of getting an even stronger electrical shock if they went to help the other person. This simulates scenarios in real life when helping others leads to greater danger for oneself. They also changed the proximity of threat by saying the electrical shock could be imminent.

So, what did they see?

Interestingly what the researchers saw is increased activation in certain regions in the brain while deciding to help others with threat to oneself. And no, they weren’t areas associated with moral, social behaviour, or cognitive behaviour. It was related to threat. Two regions: the amygdala which is strongly associated with threat detection, and an area called the insula which is involved in embodiment of feelings were both active and levels of activation correlated to willingness to help others.

What was also a surprise is that helping behaviours were correlated with this threat and defensive network but not with the distress of others. So, it is not the distress of others which was stimulating the helping but the perception of threat and the more intense this was the more likely and individual was to help.

This sounds counter-intuitive in some ways, we may assume staying calm would help, we know that too much threat can cause, stress, distress and shut down various other areas of the brain. So, I’d be Interested to know how these all play in to this.

Nevertheless, this does give us a fascinating insight into our brains when helping others. Viera and Olsson are planning further work researching how the presence of others influences behaviour on themselves and the other bystanders in similar helping scenarios. That also looks like fascinating research, and I will keep an eye out for the results.

I will also continue to help others – and hopefully my defensive network in my brain will remain active!

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Joana B Vieira, Andreas Olsson. 
Neural defensive circuits underlie helping under threat in humans. 
eLife, 2022; 11
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.78162

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Two Types of Willpower

Two Types of Willpower

by | 2022 Oct 24 | Public, Quick Hits

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

will power self control

Will power is certainly a useful thing to have and in everyday life this often means overcoming temptation.

But many of us fall short on willpower at least some of the time – but mostly very often. However, the term may be misleading because researchers think of willpower in different ways. There’s one way which is: just don’t eat that extra chocolate bar, scoff the dessert, eat the bag of crisps (chips for the rest of the world), or get out for a run in the cold rain. That is what researchers call synchronic regulation.

The other approach is to do what Odysseus did in Homer’s Epic: to get his sailors to strap him to the mast so that he couldn’t be overcome, or better respond, to the Sirens song. This therefore involves changing the environment or creating new habits to avoid temptation in the first place. This is known as diachronic regulation.

Zachary Irving et al. of Rutgers University wanted to know how normal folk view will power or self control. They conducted a series of experiments whereby respondents had to judge a person’s actions and the scenarios describe either synchronic or diachronic regulation or a mixture of both.

They found out that we normally only consider synchronic regulation as will power – that is to just resist the temptation through pure force of will. This is interesting because it shows that what researchers think and the everyday person may differ. It is also, it must be noted, the least effective strategy.

Will power requires power and is hard to exert all of the time. That is why Odysseus had the foresight to have himself strapped to the mast of his ship. He knew that shaping the environment and pre-empting his lack of ability to exert willpower was the most effective way to overcome this.

And this sage advice is a few thousand years old – but today it doesn’t apply to Sirens song but often to what we eat or how we get your daily physical activity. And now you have the terminology: diachronic regulation is the way to go.

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Zachary C. Irving, Jordan Bridges, Aaron Glasser, Juan Pablo Bermúdez, Chandra Sripada. 
Will-powered: Synchronic regulation is the difference maker for self-control. 
Cognition, 2022; 225: 105154
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105154

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Our Brains Seem to Use Quantum Computations

Our Brains Seem to Use Quantum Computations

by | 2022 Oct 20 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

brain wave consciousness

Our brain are blobs of real organic material, but we also know real material at the very small level enters into the quantum world where very strange rules apply to baffle all but the smartest scientists, and even some of the smartest scientists (such as Einstein).

There are also multiple open questions in science such as the experience of consciousness and how our brains can still outperform supercomputers in certain circumstances and conditions. That our brain uses quantum processes could explain this and has been proposed by many people before – but this is all speculation and theoretical musings. However, now we have the first glimpse of proof that our brains do indeed engage in quantum processes.

Christian Matthias Kerskens and David López Pérez of Trinity College Dublin conducted a clever experiment to try to measure what can’t be measured. I am at the limits of my knowledge, and it gets complex but let me have a go at explaining.

In trying to measure the quantum we are trying to measure the unmeasurable but there are ways to do this, for example entanglement is when particles become connected and behave in the same why despite no obvious connection and being distant in space and time. What Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.

What Kerskens and Lopeze Perez did was to measure proton spins in brain water – a natural fluid that builds up in our brain. Using a special MRI technique they were then able to measure proton spins but also to look for entangled spins. They were then able to identify EEG signals in the spins. But this would normally not be able to be observed under these conditions unless, that is, there was entanglement.

This suggests that these protons are entangled and therefore showing EEG signals despite not receiving this input directly. This is one of the first cases of direct evidence for quantum processes in the brain and this would also explain why the brain can perform some of the things it can despite its limited size. It could also help explain some aspects of consciousness – but the topic of consciousness is hotly and fiercely debated so let’s not go there for now.

Further research is necessary, of course, but it is a first promising step to getting more concrete grip on our quantum brain.

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Christian Matthias Kerskens, David López Pérez.
Experimental indications of non-classical brain functions.
Journal of Physics Communications, 2022; 6 (10): 105001
DOI: 10.1088/2399-6528/ac94be

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Insults Trigger the Equivalent of a Slap to the Face in the Brain

Insults Trigger the Equivalent of a Slap to the Face in the Brain

by | 2022 Oct 19 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

brain wave insult

Insulting other people is not a good thing to do, we know that. Though we have all been guilty of it at some stage, no doubt. Similarly, we have all probably experienced insults of varying degrees. But what does this do to our brains?

Enter Marijn Struiksma et al. who investigated the brain and skin responses of three types of statement with a view to seeing if we get used to these statements over time i.e. does an insult become weaker over time as we get used to it. Obviously running this type of experiment runs into a number of ethical problems. How do we insult people without causing them too much distress, etc.?

The resulting experimental protocol was therefore very simple: 79 participants read three statements repeatedly. A negative statement “Andy is horrible”, a positive statement “Andy is impressive”, and a neutral statement “Andy is English”. To see differences to personalised statements, 50% of the statements used other names and 50% used the name of the participant.

Now, remember this is in a lab setting with the statements not coming from an interaction with a real person, the statements were fictitious, and, on the big scale of things, very mild. However, even so, the data showed that these statements still do get at you triggering robust brain wave changes and a stress skin conductance response. But what is surprising or noteworthy is that:

  • Insults elicited strong responses irrespective of the person they were directed at (brain wave responses and skin conductance responses)
  • Insults were more powerful than compliments, triggering the equivalent of a mini-slap to the face
  • Insults did not degrade over time

This shows that there is a strong negativity bias when it comes to personal information and how sensitive we human beings are to these types of comments. But also, that negativity remains even after repetition is surprising because normally, we expect repetition to dull the effect – not so with insults.

It would be great to study this in the real world but that raises many ethical hurdles. For now, we know that insults do stimulate strong brain wave and skin conductance effects that remain persistent over time and are stronger than the effects of a compliment.

This may, on a different note, be why the rule of 6-1 was given for marriages and also business leadership. You need at least 6 positive comments to each negative comment.

Indeed, be sparing in your criticism and generous in your compliments.

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Struiksma, M. E., De Mulder, H. N. M., and Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2022).
Do People Get Used to Insulting Language? 
Front. Commun.  7.
Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.910023.

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Even a Short Bout of Exercise Can Boost Brain Growth

Even a Short Bout of Exercise Can Boost Brain Growth

by | 2022 Oct 18 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

brain growth exercise sport

Exercise is good for you – we all know that. The research is also overwhelming showing incredibly wide-ranging benefits, heart health, lower inflammation, better metabolism, lower risk of degenerative diseases, and the list goes on and on. So, all in quite simple – get exercising.

I have also reported on the multiple benefits for the brain – from exercise in childhood being able to be seen in the brain 40 year later, to general improved cognition, and brain plasticity, brain growth that is.

But most of these studies focus on long-term or bouts of exercise lasting weeks or months. What about just one session of exercise? Is it too little to have any tangible benefits apart from the short-term glow of having done something positive and having a short positive hormone boost?

Well, now a study from the Oregon Health & Science University published in July by Christina Chatzi et al. have shown that just a single bout of exercise can also have positive benefits and notably on brain plasticity, growth, itself.

This experiment was done in mice it must be noted. However, many exercise studies have translated well from mice to human beings so it is very encouraging.

What they did is put otherwise sedentary mice though a single exercise routine – this would be the equivalent of 4’000 steps for human beings – the researchers compared this to a game of pick up basketball.

I am sure you will be keen to know what they found.

Yes, very good news.

They noticed an increase in synapses, the connections between brain cells, in a region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a region that is known to be very important for memory and learning.

This happens through activating a gene called Mtss1L which seems to have been largely ignored in previous studies in the brain and exercise. This increases production of proteins that are important for shaping cell membranes and therefore helping them to growth and connect.

So, this shows that a single bout of exercise can boost synaptic growth in your hippocampus – priming your brain for learning and yes, that is growing your brain in, albeit, a small way – but also not to be scoffed at either.

So, of you go – get your sports shoes on – or just have a game of basketball, or a kick around on your way home. Your brain will thank you for it.

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Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Christina Chatzi, Gina Zhang, Wiiliam D Hendricks, Yang Chen, Eric Schnell, Richard H Goodman, Gary L Westbrook. 
Exercise-induced enhancement of synaptic function triggered by the inverse BAR protein, Mtss1L. 
eLife, 2019; 8
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.45920

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