Smiling
"Psychologists have found that even if you’re in bad mood, you can instantly lift your spirits by forcing yourself to smile." Numerous amounts of research studies have shown that making a facial expression, such as smiling, can produce effects on the body that are similar to those that result from the actual emotion, such as happiness. Paul Ekman and his colleagues have studied facial expressions of emotions and have linked specific emotions to the movement of specific facial muscles. Each basic emotion is associated with a distinctive facial expression. Sensory feedback from the expression contributes to the emotional feeling. Example: Smiling if you want to feel happy. Facial expressions have a large effect on self-reported anger and happiness which then affects your mood. Ekman has found that these expressions of emotion are universal and recognizable across widely divergent cultures.
Read more about this topic: Mood (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the word smiling:
“Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer’s lingering blooms delayed,
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o’er the green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)
“Nobody dast blame this man.... For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“But what now grips his fancy is her face,
And how the cunning picture holds her still
At just that smiling instant when her soul,
Grown sweetly faint, and swept beyond control,
Consents to his inexorable will.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)