From the Vault: The Facial Feedback Hypothesis

Darwin commented on it, and it's the idea that our emotions are not only reflected in our facial expressions, but in some ways shaped by our facial expressions that, like the movements of the body create a feedback effect that goes back in and tweaks what we're feeling. And so we tried to look at the evidence to see is this actually true? Yeah, what comes first? The smile or the happy? The happy or the smile, That's what this episode is all about. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your

Mind production of I Heart Radios How to Work. Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And let's give this opening another shot because I just tried to really corny opening line and Robert's just a look of quiet contempt across the table. I was I was laughing on the inside, you know, I'm sure you were. I wasn't even laughing at my own joke. There. Um, maybe this will be better, Okay, So we're gonna start off today by doing a Charles

Darwin deep cut. So Darwin of course published his great work on the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine, and of course that was the book that explained his theory of the origin of species, the Revolution by natural selection. Then later you got another one, that's The Descent of Man eighteen seventy one, which applied his theory to human evolution.

And then a year after that, in eighteen seventy two, he published The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, which is about the biological features of emotions like happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, for example, the relationship between what we feel and the physical expressions of those feelings in the body. Because I think this is one of those little mysteries that's so

close and so invisible, we forget to ask why. But why is it that emotions which are influenced by the content of our thoughts, like our beliefs and our knowledge what we're aware of they Why do they cause these powerful, automatic, even unconscious reactions from the muscles and glands throughout the body. Why does a feeling of moral disgust cause us to involuntarily turn our faces away and crinkle our noses up?

Or why does a feeling of embarrassment or passion sometimes cause blood to rush to the cheeks and cause us to cover parts of our faces with our hands. Or why does an emotionally manipulative TV commercial about a sad dog trigger these unconscious movements in the eyebrows and the corners of the mouth, or even engage the tear ducks if you're a real sap yes, a sad dog, the

dog should be smiling and be happy. Right, Well, there's always like those are the things that are funny, where like a really dramatically moving, you know, whole movie or book might not make me cry, but like the sentimental commercial with like the old dog Buddy and the you know, buying the purina one for him or whatever that really like gets me going finally sharpened and by um uh, you know, a multimillion dollar marketing campaigns to cut right

to the heart. Now their emotional assassins they slip in in the night their ninja. So I think these relationships between thoughts and feelings and autonomically regulated involuntary activity of the skeletal muscles in the face and elsewhere in the body is truly a fascinating evolutionary mystery. Why do our bodies execute these movements when we feel these things? What

biological purpose does it serve? And why do so many of these relationships between feelings and movements of the skeletal muscle, not all, but a lot of them. Why do they seem to transcend cultural, national, and linguistic barriers. So I think this whole area is a is a totally interesting

subject ripe for investigation. But today we wanted to focus on one specific question that arises from Darwin's work here, and to introduce this question, I want to read a passage with a few abridgements from the very end of the book, where Darwin writes about some of the implications of his observations about emotions in humans and animals. Quote. The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever their origin may have been, are in themselves of much

importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between the mother and her infant. She smiles approval and thus encourages her child on the right path, or frowns disapproval. We readily perceive it's right away, But come on, a kid was just born, just already just complete disapproval, Maybe that's more important. Later we readily perceived sympathy in others by their expression. Our sufferings are thus mitigated and our pleasures increased, and mutual good feeling is

thus strengthened. The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken word. They reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified. And then a little bit later, the free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs, softens our emotions. He who gives way to

violent gestures will increase his rage. He who does not control the signs of fear will experience fear in a greater degree. And he who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering. Elasticity of mind These results followed partly from the intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestations, and partly from the direct influence of exertion on the heart and consequently on the brain. Even the simulation of an

emotion tends to arouse it in our minds. Shakespeare, who from his wonderful knowledge of the human mind, ought to be an excellent judge, says, is it not monstrous that this player here? And this is a line from Hamlet's soliloquy, where he's watching the play, and he's watching the actors, and he concludes in the end that the plays the

thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. But earlier in the soliloquy he's uh watching the actors act, and and Hamlet thinks, is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit that from her working all his visage wand tears in his eyes, distraction in this aspect, a broken voice, and his whole functions suiting with forms to his conceit, and all for nothing.

You know, this is interesting getting into acting, because I feel like, maybe this is just me, but I feel like a lot of us when we watch a well acted scene, especially in a film as opposed to a play, where you can actually get so much closer uh to the facial features of the actor, if if the actor is is truly talented, it's something to behold watching them channel emotions, sometimes completely nonverbally, and I think it probably

stands out for a couple of reasons. For for starters, there are a lot of bad or just average performances in film where you don't see authentic emotion uh channeled, even in like scenes of extreme emotion, which you're going to encounter more often in a film perhaps than in everyday life. But even in everyday life, when we are when we're encountering someone displaying extreme emotion, were likely a part of that scenario, you know, unless we're just as

we see something on the street. But even then, I mean, are we Unless you're a complete bystander and you're just completely locked out of it, you're probably going to feel something.

That's a really good point. Whereas if you watch, if you're watching just a really well acted scene in a film, like you you have that permission of distance, right where you can stand back and say, look at what their their faces doing, like I'm watching blood vessels move, I'm seeing something in their eyes, like I'm I'm seeing authentic

emotion pour out of their face. Yeah, it's like watching a film can, especially with great acting, can be like a tasting course for human emotions, whereas normally, like you know, you'd be involved in the cooking or something where you know, and so. Uh and of course it would just be rude to try to observe other people's emotions. Uh so, yeah, Yeah, that's a really good point about acting, and it is

uh interesting. I mean we often wonder this, right, like, um, when an actor convincingly portrays an emotion or character, does

the actor actually feel that emotion? What are the important biological or psychological differences in the moment between an actor acting out in emotion with their face and their body and a person actually feeling that emotion, Like, what what are the differences you could name their Yeah, I mean, obviously they're different approaches to acting, different schools of acting, but uh, you know, certainly a lot of the time when you're seeing somebody emote on the screen, they are

they're drawing on real emotions, real experiences that are in some way comparable to what their character is supposed to feel. Yeah, and I think that's why a lot of times actors actually need time to say, get into and out of character. You know. They can't turn it off and on in an instant. I mean, I guess maybe some can, but a lot can't. They need they need a few moments to sort of gather themselves, to get in and then

gather themselves once they get out. But yeah, So anyway, Darwin is suggesting here that the bodily manifestations of emotion, including the facial expressions, are not just a consequence of the emotions we feel, though they are that, of course, uh. And the fact that we have these outward uh signs of the emotions we feel, of course, is useful for communicating our emotional states to others, and this could be

one very important biological role that these expressions play. But he says they also are involved in the regulation and maintenance of the emotions themselves. So a smile isn't just a consequence of feeling joy. The smile contributes to and sustains and modulates the feeling of joy. The tightened lip corner isn't just a result of our feeling of contempt,

but it in some way makes us feel contempt. So it's almost like there are two dogs chained to each other, and if one moves the other one cannot help but be moved as well. Right, well, I mean according to to Darwin's view here, Yeah, so his ideas that the the bodily expressions don't just follow from emotional states. They they in part are the emotional states. They contribute to and control the emotional states. Yeah yeah, and uh, you know,

we'll get into this some more. But I think that this is something that a lot of us can can point to times in our life where this either definitely feels true or other times where it definitely doesn't feel true. Like, um, for instance, I go to I go to yoga a lot I really enjoy and I think benefit physically and

mentally from a yoga practice. And there are times where you're you're in a pose and a teacher may tell everybody, don't you know, don't forget to smile, smile, and then that'll change your sort of emotional uh participation with the pose. And in those situations, it it does feel sometimes like it helps on the other hand, I've had teachers who say that they they've stopped saying that because sometimes people in the class, you know, have bad experience with being

told to smile. I mean, that's become very much a being harassed on the streets cliche of misogynistic behavior telling someone they should smile more telling someone they should smile, And it can be that alone. Yeah, I can feel no matter you know, you know, you know what what your your your gender happens to be, it's like being told to smile, as if that is just going to fix your problems, that's gonna totally change your your your mood.

It can feel insulting, right, Like, surely my emotional state depends on more than just what my face is doing. And ultimately I think we all can agree it does being told to smile, and then smiling does not fix whatever caused you to frown to begin with. And then that's not getting into the case, you know, the situation that we do need to frown, we do need to

have like the full uh spectrum of emotions. Right, that's certainly right, even if Darwin is correct, Like even if Darwin is right that the smile itself can give you some kind of feedback that in turn actually increases the positivity of your emotional state. The smile can make you happier.

I mean that that doesn't necessarily mean it's good for other, like exogenous forces to try to coerce smiling on you, to tell you should be smiling, which I think can probably lead to all kinds of other emotions that could negate whatever positivity comes from the muscle movements that might be making you happier. So, as we're talking, you know, we're not talking just about smiles, but smiles do come up a lot in in the discussion here, so I thought it would be helpful to take a moment just

talk about what a smile is. Um. You know, our smile is a bit different from the smile that we see expressed by our great ape brethren, where it is essentially a fear grin. Uh. You know it's it's often flashed when an individual is trapped or threatened, it to show of submission to more dominant members of the group, and you know it's it is then an admission of fear and a signal, uh, though a signal that doesn't

just stand on its own. It's like part of a larger bodily signal that is expressed, uh as if to say, you know, I am not hostile, I'm not a threat. And I was reading a little bit about this neuroscientist um Michael Graziano, who have discussed on the show before. He has a wonderful Eon magazine article that discusses this topic, and he points out a number of things we've talked

about here already. Also points out, you know that that even you know, with humans, people sometimes in subservient positions, will will smile a lot. You know, there's sort of the uh, you know, the the boot licking smile that we still kind of identify the idea of the obsequious smile. Yeah, and uh, and so that in that it would seem that there are certain aspects of the great ape smile

but haven't quite left us. Uh. You know. He points as well to shakespeare line from troy Less and Cressida quote they send their smiles before them to Achilles, uh, which which I think is is rather nice. So the human smile seems to have definitely emerged out of the same sort of thing. I mean, you know, we are we are primates after all. And of course, even though they're you know, a smile as a smile, as a smile. There are some cultural differences in the way smiles are

perceived from one culture to another. Um. You we mentioned, uh, Darwin mentioned babies earlier, and and certainly human newborns flash reflex smiles, but then social smiles come a little later, six to twelve weeks generally. Um. Yeah. Anyway, In this an article, uh, Graziano points out that, you know, most commentators agree that primate smiles are very old, and some think that it might have evolved out of an old or threatening display. But he thinks that if we focus

too much on the teeth, we miss something else. Again, that full body display that is evident, right, It involves multiple regions of muscles in the face. Yeah, I think stuff around the cheeks and the sides of the mouth, but also the eyes, right yeah, yeah, and even yeah, just like what you know, the full body is doing in the full uh you know, communication array that is

the face in the head. So what do you proposes ultimately is that we're talking we're talking about here is a smile that's kind of a halfway point between not reacting to a display of dominance and fully reacting to it. Um, which which is? Which is interesting? It's almost like, um, you know, these these creatures learning to lie to each other, to deceive each other, you know. Um, here's a quote from where he's talking about like monkey A and monkey be,

you know, hypothetically interacting. Quote. Monkey be can learn a lot by watching the reaction of Monkey A. If Monkey A makes a full blown protective response, cringe and all, it's a pretty good sign that Monkey A is frightened. He's uneasy, his personal space is revved up and expanded. He must view monkey B as a threat, a social superior.

On the other hand, if Monkey A reveals only a subtle response, perhaps squinting and slightly pulling back his head, it's a good sign that Monkey A is not so frightened. He does not consider Monkey B to be a social superior or a threat. So the social signal evolves from here, and he drives home the quote. The primary evolutionary pressure is on the receiver of the signal, not the sender.

The story is about how we came to react to smiles. Yeah, that's interesting, but it also raises all these other questions about So if we consider the evolution of the smile as having something to do with social signaling, and you know, it relates to the social relationships between animals that live

in groups and interact with each other. Why is it that in in our lives at least, I would say the smile is very divorced from that original context where you smile by yourself all the time, you be completely alone and something makes you happy and you find yourself beaming. Yeah, this is true. Um. Now, we've discussed before though, how we might not laugh, though we might smile but not laugh, or at least that's a good point. The laughter might be and the smile might be more pronounced if there's

someone else around, particularly you know, someone really know. Yeah, we were just talking about this before we started recording. Actually, how you know we we watched the Mystery Science Theater three thousand episode and we laugh if somebody else is in the room. It's still funny if nobody else is there,

but you just don't laugh out loud. Yeah, I've Hey, I'm trying to think of a time if I if I ever watched something and just really laughed out loud by myself, and how funny it is, like, uh, yeah, nothing comes to mind and in fact, I think I would feel weird if I did. I would feel like Sam Neil's character at the end of In the Mouth of Madness where he's uh in the movie theater. Sometimes Barbarian movies do it for me. I think I was laughing pretty loud by myself when I was watching Your

Hunter from the Future. No, maybe you were just beside yourself with laughter. And therefore you know you have you know yourself to to communicate to um. So, so basically, Graziana points out, you know that from here it would have been an evolutionary arms race. Um And and this is a wonderful article, by the way, it's titled The First Smile. It's available, you know, Eddie and magazine and uh. He gets into laughter as well. But here's how he

sums everything up. Quote. Evolution favors animals that can read and react to those signs, and it favors animals that can manipulate those signs to influence whoever is watching. We have stumbled on the defining ambiguity of human emotional life. We are always quite caught between authenticity and fakeery, always floating in the gray area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretense. Yeah, so you know, I think it's helpful to think about

the complexity of the smile, the mix of authenticity and fakeery. Um. You know, we've just I think we've discussed fake smiles on the show before about how you know, there's this lack of micro expressive detail and a fake smile that you can pick up on. Um. But that to like truly fake a smile, you do have to summon some of the energy of the smile, you know. Um. Yeah, anyway, it gets it gets very complicated, and especially in the human scenario, to to define exactly what a smile is

in the degrees of smiling. Well, here's maybe a good question. Are all smiles on command fake smiles? Or are there are there cases where you smile on command and not because you know, you suddenly are overwhelmed by a feeling of positivity and joy and happiness. You know, you just smile because you need to. But it's not fake. Yeah, this is a good question. It's it's it kind of goes in with laughter as well, or at least kind

of like the mild laughter. I think of like interactions with people, uh, you know, be be it at work or you know, strangers at a store, you know, the various social interactions that feel our lives. And I'll catch myself smiling, I'll catch myself, you know, laughing a little bit, even if there's not a joke, which seems strange, like maybe it makes me kind of feel like I'm the joker or something. Um, the man who laughs. Yeah, not in a good way, not in the Steve Miller way,

but you know, in the Batman way. Um, and yeah, and you start teasing it apart, and you start asking yourself, well, was this authentic? Was this inauthentic? Or was it or is it like Graziano says, is somewhere in between? Like for for instance, um, I think one person wrote into us once and accused one or both of us a fake laughing at each other's jokes. Do you remember this? I don't remember this, and uh, um yeah, it was a while back, and I think only it was only

one person that ever ever wrote in about it. And it just made me stop and think though, because I'm like, well, what we do here is is kind of a performance. You know, we're not reading from a script, We're having an authentic conversation, but it's a conversation knowing that someone else is listening to it, and like we we do make each other laugh, maybe we do lean into it

a little bit. I don't know it. Like it basically comes down to exactly what Graziana said that it's it's not just fakery and authenticity, but there's this there's this huge area in between, and we may not even be aware of where we are on that spectrum in a given moment. Okay, I think we gotta take a break, but we will be right back with more than Alright, we're back. Okay. So we've been discussing facial expressions emotions.

Uh Darwin's writing on the relationship between facial expressions and emotions, or not just facial expressions, I mean all kinds of body expressions and physical manifestations and emotions. Um. And so this leads up to something that we're going to be talking about for the rest of today's episode, which has

come to be known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Now, I guess to have a starting place, we should talk about what some of the acceptable emotions for discussions are, because obviously there are lots of complex emotions that might be you know, little shadings of other more basic emotions or combinations of feelings commonly acknowledged basic emotions in psychology, as categorized by the American psychologist Paul Ekman. Let's hear him,

how about happiness, sadness, surprise, discussed, anger, and fear. There you got your big six. Now, other psychologists have offered slightly different lists, but I think this seems to be like a good starting place. These are like six widely acknowledged basic emotions, setting aside for a second that you know, different theories of what emotions actually are, which will come

back to later in the episode. They're they're also like the constructionist ideas of emotions, which says, it's more like there's some kind of universal slider underneath all these and these are like categories that we apply to where that slider is. But for now, we're gonna work with those kind of six emotions and so put succinctly. The facial feedback hypothesis is the idea that quote an individual's experience

of emotion is influenced by feedback from their facial movements. Now, there are tons of different versions of this hypothesis that have been articulated and tested over the years. We'll we'll get more into those differences later on. We know Darwin proposed something like this in the eighteen seventies, and it's been advocated by other important figures in intellectual history. The Seminal.

American psychologist William James argued in his eighteen ninety work on on psychology that at least for the more basic or coarser emotions, emotions in a way simply are identical with the sensation of their physical manifestations in the body. Quote.

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no mind stuff out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. So that this is a strange idea, but this did hold some sway for a long time. It's the idea that the feeling of an emotion is the feeling of changes happening in the body, including but

not limited to the skeletal muscle. And this would center largely, but not entirely, on expressions that happen automatically in the facial muscles, but also all throughout the body. Well, you know, this does remind me that you know, when when one is smiling intensely um organically, you know you're not faking it at all, but like something is making you really

smile and perhaps laugh really hard as well. There is a feeling of possession about it where you can imagine it's like this the physical um you know, symptoms are actually kind of like crunching your brain into this, uh, this pattern of thinking, like like you are you are happy?

Now you are laughing? Now do you ever get the feeling like feeling happiness in the face in the way that if the emotion has a location, it kind of feels like it's somewhere behind the face and kind of or like it's a claw, Like it's kind of like a like a claw clamped over the face, like a xenomorph claw, uh, you know, an alien And and then you get to the point where your face is hurting a little bit, Like that is always a weird sensation where you're like, I'm I'm so happy and overcome by

joy and it's physically hurting me. I wish it would stop. Well, on the other hand, I mean other emotions. I think we often do you not, at least I do associate fear with a feeling in the stomach and the gut. Do you not associate uh, sadness with kind of feelings in like the throat and the temples and behind the face also, Yeah, yeah, I mean with with with that being, you know, it's it's often like there's a like a

nasal activation. You know, we often don't want to think about that when we we think about, you know, weeping tears of joy, but it's often not just tears of joy. It's not of joy or a snot of sadness. But it's not nearly as poetic. But uh, but that's how it works. Uh. And in terms of like fear and you know, anxiety, I often think of it as more like a like a claw. Again, I guess it's claws, like I can't get pessive clause, but it's more it is more of an internal claw clutching not the face

but the heart. I had no idea your psychic universe was all clause. Yeah, I mean that's I guess that's how I viewed the outside world. It's just a series of clause trying to um get to the heart of me. Uh. So William James also, like Darwin, addressed the subject of acting. So to to defend this idea, he brings up apathetical objection to his argument that goes something like this is so okay, So, William James, you say that bodily expressions of an of an emotion are identical to the feeling

of the emotion. Wouldn't it follow then that an actor faking in emotion is exactly the same as somebody really feeling it? And uh And the way James phrases this is that any voluntary, cold blooded arousal of the so called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us

the emotion itself. And James answers this objection by saying, first of all, you can't really test this because a lot of the bodily manifestations of emotions are in organs that we can't voluntarily control things in the you know, in the gut and the autonomic nervous system. He gives the example of tears. Most people can't cry on command, thus they can't actually perform a voluntary, cold blooded arousal

of the physical manifestations in the body. But and there are some cases where we can control those manifits stations. And in these cases, James says, the problem with the objection is that it just assumes it's obviously wrong. The cold blooded arousal of the manifestations gives us the emotion itself. He does not concede that this is an absurdity. Instead, he writes, quote, everyone knows how panic is increased by flight, and how giving way to the symptoms of grief or

anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute and calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery enrage. It is notorious how we work ourselves up to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse to express a passion and it dies. This is a famous quote. Here, uh count ten before venting your anger and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to

keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There's no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience no. If we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously and in the first instance, cold bloodedly go through the outward movements of these contrary dispositions which we

prefer to cultivate. So this is sort of the origin of fake until you make it right yeah, or um yeah, or telling people to smile and they'll be happy. I mean, it's uh yeah, this this, I mean, he puts it so well, and my my response is both yes and no, like you know this, this feels absolutely true, but also, like you know, so many different objections pop up as well. I mean, for starters, just the idea of like, refused

to express a passion and it dies. I mean that runs counter to a lot of at least you know, so certainly to the advice that is often given about passions and how we should not bury them inside of us, because it won't die if it is buried inside us, that it will find a way out, and it might not find its way out in in a in a way or at least at a time that is uh, that that that that is beneficial. Well, I I am also of two minds about this, um and the idea

of yeah, refused to expression express a passion and it dies. Um. I think I've talked on the podcast before about how I'm often skeptical of the benefits of what people call venting, though at the same time, I don't think it's good to, you know, have strong feelings about something and have nobody to talk to them about, you know, and when you can't talk about something that is psychologically stressful, it's a

burden on you. And so like, on one hand, you do need to be able to talk about things, But there's this thing people call venting, which is like something is bothering them and they just like continually express their frustration and a kind of repetitive pattern about it. I tend to notice throughout my life that this, in myself and in others, this doesn't actually make you feel better.

That the venting process, I think most of the time just makes you matter and matter You work yourself up into a state where the problem assumes a larger posture than it did to begin with, and you're talking about like speaking aloud. That's sort of venting, because it seems like that sort of a venting has a very has a lot in common with the things that go on

inside the mind and the default mode network. As we ruminate over something some worry we we we kind of rehearse for disasters, for example, or we um we essentially fantasize about terrible things occurring, and um, you know it's it's it's kind of the same practice, right, I mean, it's uh, you know, it's it's filling your mind with some sort of negative outcome, be be it, you know, you yelling at somebody or um, you know, we're bad

things happening to you, kind of rehear source for disaster. Yeah, the psychological process of rumination where you where you just like rehearse the worst possible scenarios in your mind over and over again is terrible. But then the idea here, though, is there could be like a feedback loop if you're actually if if you're expressing it bodily and facially, then it's just gonna potentially make things worse. Yeah, um, and

I do think to some extent that's true. So yeah, obviously we're dealing with something that's very complicated and that's not a surprise because it involves emotions. I think emotions are I mean, we'll go ahead and say today, emotions are one of the most difficult things to study scientifically, I think, um and and so studies about them are often plagued with problems of inconsistency and how the emotions are characterized, how they're measured, How exactly do you quantify

emotional states. It's one of the most difficult problems in all of science. I think, Yeah, how do you even agree on the basic terminology? And then if you end up creating something that seems like a useful explanation, is it ultimately just kind of you know, a system of metaphors to try and make sense of this thing. You know, it's kind of like the movie, the Pixar movie inside Out.

I hadn't seen it. A wonderful movie about about emotions, uh, you know, but ultimately like there are not you know, a series of individuals inside of your head arguing with each other and going on adventures. Uh. So you know you worry too about like to what extent you end up like going too far in one of these directions and in really trying to uh you know, apply language to the the the n language complexity of the mind.

But obviously, then again, emotions are one of the most important features of our entire lives, and so psychology should be taking a crack and understanding them. And so I guess that brings us back to the back to this question of the facial feedback hypothesis. If it's true that movements of the facial muscles or facial expressions do contribute to our underlying emotional states, they don't just follow from them, but they feed back into them and in some way

control them. Is the evidence for that? Is there evidence that that's true? And I guess that's what we should discuss next. So one thing we absolutely do not lack for is studies on this subject. The facial feedback hypothesis is huge, and it's a very complicated subject with a massive and conflicting research history. There's no way to discuss all these studies. But in a minute we will be looking at a recent meta analysis paper that sort of

gives an overview of these findings. Now, one thing is like problems with methodology we were just alluding to, and how you study things like the relationship between facial expressions and emotions. Of course, you can just ask people to smile or frown or do things with their face and

then ask them how they feel. But these kinds of experiments would have some obvious limitations, right like if people are aware of being asked to smile, uh this knowledge could change how they report their feelings and it could

buyas the results. You could have acquiescence bias, where you know, people in an experiment tend to just sort of try to figure out what the experimenters want and give them those types of results, or more generally, what are referred to UH as demand characteristics where but where things emerge

in the research environment that would not emerge naturally. So different tests devised over the years have tried to get around this a number of ways, trying to like contort the facial muscles and see if that does something to emotional states without just saying, hey, you know, could you please frown for a minute and then we're gonna ask you to do a questionnaire. So, like, one type of thing is the pin in the mouth study. So here's one where you put a pin either between your lips

or you put a pin between your teeth. When you put a pin between your lips. It just happens to form your face into a frown. When you put a pin between your teeth, it happens to induce the same muscles that you would use in a smile. So that's been used in a number of studies. Another thing is like asking participants to say a lot of certain vowels. For example, awe sounds incidentally produced smile posture and oh

sounds incidentally produced frown posture. And some research has found, for example, that awe sounds people make people self report more happy or pleasant feelings. And I've even seen this connected to the prevalence of awe sounds and religious chance. I thought it was kind of an interesting uh idea there, like a halla, hallelujah kind of all kinds of I mean that awe sounds are more prevalent around the world in religious chants than ow sounds. And this could be

because they induce more pleasant mental states. Now where does own fall them? I hopefully am would be between the two right, Well maybe, But out of this this huge history of of all these different studies, uh, just this year we got this big meta analysis pulled together tabulating a hundred and thirty eight different studies on the effect. It was by Nicholas A. Coles, Jeff T. Larson, and Heathersea Lynch, published in Psychology Coal Bulletin in twenty nineteen.

And so, okay, you might think that given that many studies a hundred and thirty eight studies, now we should have a really solid body of evidence converging on a clear consensus answer. Uh And in one broad sense that's true, and in many more specific senses it's not true to quote the authors here. Unfortunately, more than a centuries worth of research has not yet clarified whether facial feedback effects

are reliable. For example, researchers have produced a variety of theoretical disagreements about when facial feedback effects should emerge, but it remains unclear which, if any of these theories are correct. Furthermore, seventeen labs recently found that even the most seminal demonstration of facial feedback effects is not clearly replicable. Uh So,

and this was a big problem. So like one of the biggest studies it was, it was a pin in the mouth study that found that, you know, putting a pin between the teeth made people report more happy emotions than putting it between the lips. Uh that that was big, But then just recently a bunch of abs tried to replicate it and they couldn't. So here here's this big question what all these studies add up to. So here's

where this new meta analysis comes in. Quote amid this uncertainty, we provide a narrative review of research on the facial feedback hypothesis and a meta analysis of all available experimental evidence. So they're pulling all the studies together and trying to see if they can crunch the numbers and figure out what is shown overall. So I think maybe we should take another break and then when we come back we can get into the results of this study. Alright, we're back.

So yeah, we're looking at a meta analysis of all of these uh, these different studies about facial feedback hypothesis and hopefully like some sense will emerge from it. All right, they we'll have some some some some general um you know, ideas that we can draw from it. Right, we will get some we there are other things that are left unanswered. So one of the things is that we we alluded to all these different problems and how you study something

like the facial feedback hypothesis. Uh. Like, the authors identify four major theoretical disagreements in how people even approach the subject to begin with, I'll try to simplify them as briefly as I can. One is modulation versus initiation. Okay, So one one view says that emotions are maintained and modulated by body expression. So you're genuinely happy, You're feeling happy, and that makes you smile, and then the smile can maintain and intensify the happiness, or suppressing the smile can

put a damper on the happiness. This is the modulation hypothesis. Meanwhile, the other view would say that at least some emotions can be created out of nothing with facial feedback alone. So maybe you're feeling neutral, but you make yourself frowned for five minutes and you actually end up feeling sad. This is the initiation hypothesis. So the author's note something

interesting here that maybe we wouldn't have thought about otherwise. Uh. They know that this distinction assumes that emotional experiences have a beginning and an ending, that they are discreet rather than continuous and always in flux. Like, if you feel happy, can you pinpoint the moment when you started feeling happy And was there no happiness before or was it just something that got turned up in amplitude? But was there before? Uh?

This is an interesting question, Like our emotions discrete things that can begin an end, or they part of a continuous media that's always in flux with maybe uh, And of course if they are, there's maybe no difference between initiation and modulation. Yeah, it makes me think it's like it's like a flow state and non emotional state. I've

never heard it put like that. I don't have to think about that because generally when I think about being in a flow state, I think about it being happiness, because like it's you're content, you're not you know, you're totally wrapped up in the task at hand and you're not uh, you know, thinking about anything else. But then again, is it is it really happiness or is it like just sort of removal from the uh, you know, the wheel of emotions to some extent, disengaging from the default

mode network, that's for sure. Uh. Yeah, And the default mode network sometimes just seems like kind of a roulette wheel of emotions stuff. It's just spin it and let's just see what what the what the universe has for me right now? Am I gonna be happy in the next minute? Or sad? It's like you or and feel like I just I have no idea for me. It's like which of your failures would you like to contemplate? Default? Okay, so next you've got discreet versus dimensional emotional experience. So

our happiness, anger, sadness all that? Are they discrete categories? Do these basic emotions exist as sort of separate programs within the brain or can they all be reduced to some underlying phenomena presenting at different levels of intensity and valence. So the basic idea here is like, imagine you've got a couple of sliders in your brain. One is a slider that's the valence, is this positive or negati? And then the other slider is the level of arousal. Are

you high high arousal or low arousal? And that those two sliders, positioned at different places, actually give you the things you think of as your normal emotions. The names of the emotions are just sort of like categories that we apply based on contextual clues. That's a possibility. Yeah, I was thinking a little about this yesterday because I was working on another episode's notes and I was listening to a little Jackson Brown was playing um Fountain of Sorrow,

and I had to stop. It's like because I was thinking, is this is this song making me feel good or bad? Is it making me happy or sad? It's like it's but it's neither, you know, it's it's this mix of both. Like it's a kind of a sad bittersweet song that's beautifully recorded and I have you know, nostalgia for it,

but it's also you know, it's complicated. Yeah, there are a lot of moments where you can start to wonder if this is I think sometimes called like the constructionist or core affect uh idea of emotions where they're not these discrete programs running in the brain, but they they're the same thing. They're the same part of the same

continuous quantity. And we just like apply categories to different zones on this graph basically uh and and depending on what the contextual clues are, because one level of high arousal and negative emotion in one state might feel like, you know, like anger and agitation, and in another state it might be more like sadness, intense sadness. But obviously, you know, I don't know which of these theories of

emotion is the correct one. But that's another thing that's at play, and all these studies, people are working off different theories of emotion when they're trying to study whether emotions can be modulated or caused by facial movements. Next big question is awareness involved. If facial feedback does influence our emotions, do you have to be consciously aware of the face you're making or how you're moving your muscles, Like I feel myself smiling. I know that smile els

mean happiness, so I feel happy? Or do these facial movements if the facial feedback hypothesis is correct, do these facial movements influence our emotions unconsciously through uh, you know, through feedback mechanisms that happen outside of our awareness. Huh. Well, in my experience, for whatever that's worth, I find that being aware of your happiness is once you're fire away to potentially bring it down. You know. It's a good point, like so, but but then again, I don't know how

that but that actually relates to naither research here. Well, it's it's it's hard to think yourself happy, but it's pretty easy to think yourself sad. Now, one thing we mentioned earlier is like some of those studies are are aimed at trying to show that the the effect happens without conscious awareness, Like the pin in the mouth study. Right, If you put a pin between people's teeth and that makes them feel happier, obviously they're not going to be

aware of the fact that they're smiling. They've just got a pin in their teeth. Uh, So that for what? And there were study that showed something like that, I think back in the nineteen eighties. However, that was the study that failed replication in recent years, so people tried to do the experiment again didn't get the same result.

That means that either there was something wrong with the initial experiment or with all the replication attempts, or they could both be sound but arriving at different results because there's some important difference that's not being controlled for their So that that's something I don't know the answer to yet. I think I saw there might be a study that was trying to resolve whatever difference was going on there, but but I I didn't have time to look into that.

One more big question, does facial feedback have an effect on affective judgments, so not just how you feel, but what you think about other things. You know, third parties, What what do you think about this cup? What do you think about this microphone? I'm sorry that a cup is so often an example that we invoke on in the moment here, and it's either going to be that or the foam soundproofing board. So so, but what do

you think about these things? So, if our facial expressions modulate our emotions, do they do just that or do they also change the ways that we make judgments about these external objects, people and and situations. And the authors called this the affective judgments hypothesis. Uh dos frowning make

you view another person more negatively? So obviously, all these theoretical disagreements make a meta analysis of the facial feedback hypothesis really difficult because despite how many studies there are now, they're not all testing exactly the same thing. They're not all working from the same theoretical framework. So the authors had to like code for all these differences in what's being tested in each study, as well as lots of

other moderators, including how the facial feedback was manipulated. For example, you know, the pin and the teeth, or just asking people to do a facial pose, or even uh, experimenting with people who have had botoxic injections that restrict facial movement. That's an interesting one, yeah. Uh. And then other moderators like the timing of measurement, uh, the gender for example, some earlier research found that maybe men were more susceptible

to body feedback on average than women. Uh, And whether subjects were aware of being video recorded and things like that. All right, so time for the results. Uh. The I would say the top line here is that some facial feedback effects seem to be real, but the effect is

not huge. The overall body of research suggests that the effect is real, it is significant, but it's relatively small, and it's variable based on a lot of different things, like on these theoretical disagreements and moderating variables that we mentioned earlier. So just a few key selections from the

specifics of the results. Uh. One is this question about initiation versus modulation, Right, can facial feedback only influence pre existing emotions or can it actually create new emotional experiences from a starting neutral state? And the evidence shows it can definitely do both. In fact, contrary to many historical predictions and assumptions, the initiation of emotions through facial posing is pretty well supported by evidence and seems to be

pretty easy to demonstrate. So it's not just the modulation of what you're already feeling. You They've shown a bunch of times now that you can just take people, make them do a facial pose, and it does sort of generate an emotion from out of nowhere. However, there is more evidence for some emotions than others, like that there is evidence of a small facial feedback effect for most emotions, but not for a couple of key ones, surprise and fear. So people who make a happy face, the evidence shows,

on average, will tend to feel more happy. But if you make a surprised face or a fearful face, there is not yet good evidence that you will feel those two emotions. Though the authors caution this conclusion because they say there aren't a whole lot of studies on the feedback effect for fear and surprise. Somehow, I can really see how this would be the case for surprise. I don't know how you could simulate prize just by putting a surprise face on the surprise seems so much more

really dependent on actual facts of your surroundings. Yeah, I wonder if if part of this might be that they're just you know, if we go back to you know what I'm talking about with Graziano and his um um, you know, monkey A and monkey B scenario. Um, Like,

is there ever a necessity to to fake surprise? I mean, certainly if there's a surprise birthday party and you knew about it and you're like, oh yeah, or your people suck at that, right, Yeah, I mean we we do, like when you I think most of us, if we were asked to fake surprise, we would we would have a hard time doing anything convincing, you know, like it's generally the kind of thing where again it's a it's a surprise party that you knew about, or you're humoring

like a child's um uh you know game, you know, of of scaring you or something, whereas faking um you know, these other emotions would have much more advantage and are much more a part of the human emotional deception tool chest. Yeah, I think that it's right, though, I just do want to reiterate again their their caution that this may just be because there are fewer studies on on these emotions, and we don't know that in a really strong way. But the evidence for those two emotions is not as

strong as it is for all the others. Right, Like, I don't know that I've ever been though accused of faking fear, you know, like no one said, No one's ever written in into the show and said you, I don't think you were really afraid when you were talking about this particular frightening concept. I think you're faking your fear. I've never thought about this before. But what emotion is most often acted badly in movies? What emotion are people

the worst at trying to portray in a fictional scenario? Oh? Man, I've seen them. I've seen them all done poorly, and it contains spectacular in any case. I mean, with fear and surprise, you know, we can certainly think to really affect like when it's done well throughout, whatever acting method is employed, like, it really sticks in your mind. It's a reason that we mean, how many of us right now are thinking of Donald Sutherland from the the An

Invasion of the Body Snatchers film. You know, it's such an iconic cinematic Uh, you know, moment of just absolute um fear, right. But a lot of directors actually go out of their way to create real surprises on sets for the actors when they want to get a truly shocked and surprised response. Like I'm thinking of the scene and Alien where the thing bursts out of John Hurt's chest. Uh, you know the first time the actors didn't know exactly

what was going to happen in that scene. I think they thought something was going to happen, but they didn't have all the details. I think an important thing that Ridley Scott was going for there was trying to make sure that they got a real look of shock on their faces. May because even though they were all great actors,

he didn't trust them enough with surprise. Yeah, I mean there are there are a number of different filmmaking stories about that right where where you end up having this rift between the actors and the director because the director assumes that they need to pull some sort of stunt to get that kind of emotion out of them. Was it the Exorcist where they were allegations or stories about like firing uh, like a firearm being discharged on the

set to make all the actors beyond edge. Yeah, there are a lot of bad stories about the production of The Exorcist. Okay, okay, we got to get back to this. So um a couple more things in their results. Is awareness necessary? Do you have to be aware that you're expressing an emotion on your face for the expression to influence your feelings? The results did not demonstrate that you have to be aware, but they also don't disconfirm there might be some role for self perception in some cases. Uh.

Do facial movements influence affective judgments? You know, judging other things? The authors found that this question, unlike the general question of facial feedback, suffered from publication bias uh and so. And that's, of course, when studies confirming and effect are more likely to be published than the same studies if they had disconfirmed the effect, uh and so. When that bias was corrected for, the results did not yet indicate

strong evidence for facial expressions changing affect of judgment. However, the authors caution against abandoning this line of inquiry because this one could be highly context dependent. They point out that there's some other research in psychology that suggests emotions only change our judgments about external stimuli in some contexts, maybe like when emotion seems relevant to the thing you're judging.

More research is needed here to invoke a cliche. But then then they also talk about how their findings interact with some competing psychological theories on the nature of emotion,

like we talked about earlier. Um, you know that this question of our emotions like happiness and anger and fear discrete programs within the brain, or are the contextual categorizations of different variations of intensity and valance with this more basic core affect And the results of the meta analysis show that facial feedback can influence not only reports of basic emotions, but dimensional reports that would be in line with the theory of emotions more based on core affect.

So facial feedback doesn't really solve this question. As best I can tell, it could be consistent with either way of looking at what emotions are uh. They also found that results even within the same categories were fairly variable, suggesting that there were influences on these effects that are not recorded in the data and that they weren't able

to test. And one example they give of what this might be is perhaps facial feedback effects are stronger in populations that are on average more quote attentive to their bodily cues, including but not limited to appropriate receptive cues from the face. And of course, appropriate reception is our sensation. You know, when we have more than five senses, right, it's one of the body senses that lets us know

where the parts of our body are. It's how you can know where your hands are even when your eyes are closed. Um. And so it's this part of this appropriate receptive sense. Uh and and this could be an in fluencing factor. But the studies, of course haven't tried to record or measure this. And I take this to mean that people who have stronger senses of inter reception in general, the sensations within their own bodies, those people might be more sensitive to feelings created by the movements

of the muscles in their face. And they also cite maybe different exclusion criteria on different studies could have influenced why some of the results are so variable. But they say in the end that quote, the cumulative evidence to date suggests that facial feedback does indeed influence emotional experience, given all the caveats we just talked about. So I think that's interesting. So like, what are some takeaways from

this number one? We don't know yet when and why the effects will be largest, and in general the effects are real but kind of small. Though you could see how this knowledge could be applied to some kind of therapeutic uses. I think we probably don't know enough about it to to use it most effectively that way yet. But say, if you are trying ring to testincy, you know, could I make myself feel better by just making my

face smile? It's it's at least one of those things where I think the risks and downsides associated with trying that out are probably extremely low, right, I mean, especially if you're not like to come back to the yoga example, like if one does experiment with smiling during certain poses, like you're not you're you're also doing all the yoga, you're doing the you know, there's also the experience of say, you know, working with the teacher, of being in the space.

They're all these other factors that are contributing, and you're not going to make or break it uh necessarily by

engaging and UH and this smiling exercise. UH. Likewise, I should point out though that that there are other things that exercise the one does with your your face that I would that could possibly play a role here, being, for instance, just moving your face around in hot ways, or making what is referred to his lion face, where you just make an exaggerated like uh, you know, childish, cartoonish monster face out of your own face, and like that can be kind of a way of potentially just

like clearing whatever is physically going on with your face that could be exerting this mild influence on your emotional disposition. Yeah, well, I I wouldn't be surprised if there could be like a making monster faces in the mirror therapy kind of thing, Like you make your monster faces in the mirror, and then there's some kind of change in the emotional centers of the brain caused by these facial muscle movements. Yeah, Like maybe it is I'm signaling, um, I mean to

get back to the lion thing. Maybe it is some sort of like dominance and and um uh you know, aggression, it is related, or maybe it's simply like your brain is not that familiar with it, Like do I ever make lion face? Uh the rest of the time in my life? I don't think I really do. So maybe my I'm just I don't have like a bunch of you know, emotional material just like lined up for that

particular facial feature. Yeah, and so I would emphasize again like, obviously we don't know how effective this could be in the long run. It like you say, you were trying to do something really serious like battle depression or something. We're not necessarily saying this is the fix because again the effects are small. We don't know exactly how effective it would be that kind of thing, or what ways, what ways you could manipulate the scenario to make it

more effective. But like I said, this is something that does seem like a very low risk kind of thing to try if you are trying to manipulate your own moods and emotions, and certainly much you know, lower risk than a lot of the things people actually do to try to regulate their emotions, like self medicating with drugs

and alcohol and all that. Right. Yeah, And of course, you know, again, I do want to come back to the fact that there are cultural differences in the way that we use smiles and um and react to smiles. So I mean that's always something to keep in mind as well, Like, is it a given culture aware smiling is done more given culture or even a given individual, where smiling when embarrassed and when embarrassed is more of a you know, a typical feature, Like how would that

influence any of this? Yeah, I'm sure that could contribute. Yeah. And then also thinking about like the full body scenario we're talking about earlier with the with the the hypothetical apes reacting to each other, Like if if you're dealing with a smile and it's just you know, some of these experiments and it's just isolated to the face, Uh, is that truly the expression or is the is this should the smile be part of a like a broader

you know, physical manifestation. Well, another thing that makes me think of is uh, you know, this came up a little bit when we're thinking about the idea of research that used people who had botox injections in the face, uh to see you know, if that affected their emotional cognition.

This makes me think more generally about the relationship between skeletal muscle in the face and throughout the body and our emotional states, and whether there could be relationships there that we don't fully understand yet, but that how you use your body contributes to your state of mind. Absolutely. But you know, the great thing about all this is that is that this is a wonderful area for individual experience and feedback this episode, Like everybody out there has

experienced with emotions. And have you ever smiled? Have you ever smiled? Um? Have you ever frowned? I mean, you know, we've discussed cultural differences in individual differences, so I would I would love to hear some details about about that from folks out there. Um, you know, what are your experiences with being told to smile? What are your experiences with being you know, encouraged to smile during yoga? Or laughter?

Yoga is a whole other area. You're talking more about laughter than than just smiling alone there, But that's very much a situation where the idea is pretend to laugh until you were laughing. And I've I've I've tried that. I tried it a few times, and I find that it works to like a reasonable degree. Like I don't feel like laughter has possessed me bodily, like there's some sort of a you know, a demon uh leeching into me.

But I do find myself you're looking for, Well, I don't know, I've not that I'm necessarily look king for it, but I've seen I've seen people um overcome with laughter and scenarios like that. Like basically, when I was in high school, I think I visited a church with a friend where they were doing some form of faith healing.

I'm not sure what the terminology is for it, but where an individual would be touched by the pastor and instead of just simply like you know, falling to the floor being healed of their ailment, they would begin laughing hysterically. That was the physical manifestation of being touched with, you know, the Holy Spirit or whatever they the description was. So I guess I was kind of I could not help

but think of that when engaging in laughter yoga. Uh And and so I just want to drive home that my experience was not a situation of being overcome by you know, out of control laughter. But then again, the priming wasn't there for that to be the case either, So you know, could be a situation where if I were entering into it and people were saying, yeah, we're gonna do laughter yoga and you're gonna lose control of your body, then perhaps that would be more inclined to

like to fall into that scenario. Laughter is weird. It's what I'm saying, it is. It is weird. Yeah, it's something we can come back to again. So yeah, if you have any any tidbits from your life that you would like to share with us, let us know. In the meantime, check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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