Your face is evidence of a quiet experiment all the time. You just don’t know it. Before your brain decides how you feel, your muscles are already sending it data, and that data matters more than most of us realize.
The science of smiling is so interesting and more powerful than you might know.
The Science of Smiling
If you love nerding out on psychology as much as I do, SciSchoPsych is a channel worth bookmarking.
This episode dives into the facial feedback hypothesis. It’s the idea that our facial expressions don’t just reflect our emotions, they can actually shape them.
This has real implications for both loneliness and connection (and Connect is the first element of The Weekend Reset’s COMPASS model).
The Experiment That Started It All
This research has been around for a long time. Early studies asked participants to contract specific facial muscles, like turning up the corners of their mouth, and then measured how they felt afterward.
They even used electric shocks as stimuli, if you can believe it.
The study that really put this on the map was in 1988. Researchers had 175 university students hold a pen in their mouth while completing tasks.
Some held it between their teeth, forcing a smile. Others held it between their lips, creating more of a pout.
Crucially, participants couldn’t see their own faces. When they later rated a series of funny comics, the “smilers” consistently found them funnier.
Their faces had quietly impacted their mood without them even realizing it.
Newer Psychology Studies on Smiling
In 2016, a study aimed to replicate the original study, involving 17 research groups and nearly 1,900 participants. It failed to reproduce the results of the previous study.
So what happened?
A video camera had been added to the experimental setup. Many researchers believe being watched made participants just self-conscious enough to disrupt the effect entirely.
It wasn’t an exact replication after all.
Then, in 2018, researchers tried again and removed the video component.
The facial feedback effect reappeared.
What I love about the SciSchoPsych channel is how they sit with this kind of messiness that’s typical in research. They end with questions rather than tidy conclusions.
That’s just the nature of social science.
We’re studying humans. It’s never going to be perfectly clean. A professor of mine once said that if you wanted to control for every variable, you should go grow peas.
Can You Catch Emotions Like a Virus?
This is where it gets even more interesting. I’m a big believer in emotional contagion. This is the phenomenon where emotions don’t just stay inside us, they ripple outward and land on the people around us.
And it goes both ways.
We’re constantly picking up the emotional states of people, often with microexpressions we’re not even consciously registering.
This short NPR video explains how we mirror each other’s facial expressions almost automatically. That mirroring doesn’t just signal empathy. It actually shifts how we feel in return.
Sociologist Barrett Michaelec takes this further in a TEDx Talk, framing emotional contagion as an innate superpower we can deliberately use to foster connection.
Try Your Own Experiment
You don’t need a research lab. Just try smiling at someone. A stranger, a coworker, someone at the grocery store. Pay attention to what happens inside you. Notice what happens between you.
That’s it. That’s the whole experiment. I hope you’ll give it a try.
For more strategies and resources on building connection, visit The Weekend Reset Challenge Toolkit and The Weekend Reset Challenge Community.
