Speaker 1: Hey, you, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for a classic episode.
Speaker 1: This episode originally aired on June nineteen, and it was
Speaker 1: about the facial feedback hypothesis, something that has been proposed
Speaker 1: supposed for many years now. It goes back a long ways.
Speaker 1: Darwin commented on it, and it's the idea that our
Speaker 1: emotions are not only reflected in our facial expressions, but
Speaker 1: in some ways shaped by our facial expressions that, like
Speaker 1: the movements of the body create a feedback effect that
Speaker 1: goes back in and tweaks what we're feeling. And so
Speaker 1: we tried to look at the evidence to see is
Speaker 1: this actually true? Yeah, what comes first? The smile or
Speaker 1: the happy? The happy or the smile, That's what this
Speaker 1: episode is all about. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind production of I Heart Radios How to Work. Hey,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And let's give this
Speaker 1: opening another shot because I just tried to really corny
Speaker 1: opening line and Robert's just a look of quiet contempt
Speaker 1: across the table. I was I was laughing on the inside,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm sure you were. I wasn't even laughing
Speaker 1: at my own joke. There. Um, maybe this will be better, Okay,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna start off today by doing a Charles
Speaker 1: Darwin deep cut. So Darwin of course published his great
Speaker 1: work on the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: and of course that was the book that explained his
Speaker 1: theory of the origin of species, the Revolution by natural selection.
Speaker 1: Then later you got another one, that's The Descent of
Speaker 1: Man eighteen seventy one, which applied his theory to human evolution.
Speaker 1: And then a year after that, in eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: he published The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,
Speaker 1: which is about the biological features of emotions like happiness, sadness, surprise, fear,
Speaker 1: for example, the relationship between what we feel and the
Speaker 1: physical expressions of those feelings in the body. Because I
Speaker 1: think this is one of those little mysteries that's so
Speaker 1: close and so invisible, we forget to ask why. But
Speaker 1: why is it that emotions which are influenced by the
Speaker 1: content of our thoughts, like our beliefs and our knowledge
Speaker 1: what we're aware of they Why do they cause these powerful, automatic,
Speaker 1: even unconscious reactions from the muscles and glands throughout the body.
Speaker 1: Why does a feeling of moral disgust cause us to
Speaker 1: involuntarily turn our faces away and crinkle our noses up?
Speaker 1: Or why does a feeling of embarrassment or passion sometimes
Speaker 1: cause blood to rush to the cheeks and cause us
Speaker 1: to cover parts of our faces with our hands. Or
Speaker 1: why does an emotionally manipulative TV commercial about a sad
Speaker 1: dog trigger these unconscious movements in the eyebrows and the
Speaker 1: corners of the mouth, or even engage the tear ducks
Speaker 1: if you're a real sap yes, a sad dog, the
Speaker 1: dog should be smiling and be happy. Right, Well, there's
Speaker 1: always like those are the things that are funny, where
Speaker 1: like a really dramatically moving, you know, whole movie or
Speaker 1: book might not make me cry, but like the sentimental
Speaker 1: commercial with like the old dog Buddy and the you know,
Speaker 1: buying the purina one for him or whatever that really
Speaker 1: like gets me going finally sharpened and by um uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a multimillion dollar marketing campaigns to cut right
Speaker 1: to the heart. Now their emotional assassins they slip in
Speaker 1: in the night their ninja. So I think these relationships
Speaker 1: between thoughts and feelings and autonomically regulated involuntary activity of
Speaker 1: the skeletal muscles in the face and elsewhere in the
Speaker 1: body is truly a fascinating evolutionary mystery. Why do our
Speaker 1: bodies execute these movements when we feel these things? What
Speaker 1: biological purpose does it serve? And why do so many
Speaker 1: of these relationships between feelings and movements of the skeletal muscle,
Speaker 1: not all, but a lot of them. Why do they
Speaker 1: seem to transcend cultural, national, and linguistic barriers. So I
Speaker 1: think this whole area is a is a totally interesting
Speaker 1: subject ripe for investigation. But today we wanted to focus
Speaker 1: on one specific question that arises from Darwin's work here,
Speaker 1: and to introduce this question, I want to read a
Speaker 1: passage with a few abridgements from the very end of
Speaker 1: the book, where Darwin writes about some of the implications
Speaker 1: of his observations about emotions in humans and animals. Quote.
Speaker 1: The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever
Speaker 1: their origin may have been, are in themselves of much
Speaker 1: importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means
Speaker 1: of communication between the mother and her infant. She smiles
Speaker 1: approval and thus encourages her child on the right path,
Speaker 1: or frowns disapproval. We readily perceive it's right away, But
Speaker 1: come on, a kid was just born, just already just
Speaker 1: complete disapproval, Maybe that's more important. Later we readily perceived
Speaker 1: sympathy in others by their expression. Our sufferings are thus
Speaker 1: mitigated and our pleasures increased, and mutual good feeling is
Speaker 1: thus strengthened. The movements of expression give vividness and energy
Speaker 1: to our spoken word. They reveal the thoughts and intentions
Speaker 1: of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified.
Speaker 1: And then a little bit later, the free expression by
Speaker 1: outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: the repression, as far as this is possible, of all
Speaker 1: outward signs, softens our emotions. He who gives way to
Speaker 1: violent gestures will increase his rage. He who does not
Speaker 1: control the signs of fear will experience fear in a
Speaker 1: greater degree. And he who remains passive when overwhelmed with
Speaker 1: grief loses his best chance of recovering. Elasticity of mind
Speaker 1: These results followed partly from the intimate relation which exists
Speaker 1: between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestations, and
Speaker 1: partly from the direct influence of exertion on the heart
Speaker 1: and consequently on the brain. Even the simulation of an
Speaker 1: emotion tends to arouse it in our minds. Shakespeare, who
Speaker 1: from his wonderful knowledge of the human mind, ought to
Speaker 1: be an excellent judge, says, is it not monstrous that
Speaker 1: this player here? And this is a line from Hamlet's soliloquy,
Speaker 1: where he's watching the play, and he's watching the actors,
Speaker 1: and he concludes in the end that the plays the
Speaker 1: thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. But
Speaker 1: earlier in the soliloquy he's uh watching the actors act,
Speaker 1: and and Hamlet thinks, is it not monstrous that this
Speaker 1: player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Speaker 1: could force his soul so to his own conceit that
Speaker 1: from her working all his visage wand tears in his eyes,
Speaker 1: distraction in this aspect, a broken voice, and his whole
Speaker 1: functions suiting with forms to his conceit, and all for nothing.
Speaker 1: You know, this is interesting getting into acting, because I
Speaker 1: feel like, maybe this is just me, but I feel
Speaker 1: like a lot of us when we watch a well
Speaker 1: acted scene, especially in a film as opposed to a play,
Speaker 1: where you can actually get so much closer uh to
Speaker 1: the facial features of the actor, if if the actor
Speaker 1: is is truly talented, it's something to behold watching them
Speaker 1: channel emotions, sometimes completely nonverbally, and I think it probably
Speaker 1: stands out for a couple of reasons. For for starters,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of bad or just average performances
Speaker 1: in film where you don't see authentic emotion uh channeled,
Speaker 1: even in like scenes of extreme emotion, which you're going
Speaker 1: to encounter more often in a film perhaps than in
Speaker 1: everyday life. But even in everyday life, when we are
Speaker 1: when we're encountering someone displaying extreme emotion, were likely a
Speaker 1: part of that scenario, you know, unless we're just as
Speaker 1: we see something on the street. But even then, I mean,
Speaker 1: are we Unless you're a complete bystander and you're just
Speaker 1: completely locked out of it, you're probably going to feel something.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point. Whereas if you watch, if
Speaker 1: you're watching just a really well acted scene in a film,
Speaker 1: like you you have that permission of distance, right where
Speaker 1: you can stand back and say, look at what their
Speaker 1: their faces doing, like I'm watching blood vessels move, I'm
Speaker 1: seeing something in their eyes, like I'm I'm seeing authentic
Speaker 1: emotion pour out of their face. Yeah, it's like watching
Speaker 1: a film can, especially with great acting, can be like
Speaker 1: a tasting course for human emotions, whereas normally, like you know,
Speaker 1: you'd be involved in the cooking or something where you know,
Speaker 1: and so. Uh and of course it would just be
Speaker 1: rude to try to observe other people's emotions. Uh so, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a really good point about acting, and it is
Speaker 1: uh interesting. I mean we often wonder this, right, like, um,
Speaker 1: when an actor convincingly portrays an emotion or character, does
Speaker 1: the actor actually feel that emotion? What are the important
Speaker 1: biological or psychological differences in the moment between an actor
Speaker 1: acting out in emotion with their face and their body
Speaker 1: and a person actually feeling that emotion, Like, what what
Speaker 1: are the differences you could name their Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously they're different approaches to acting, different schools of acting,
Speaker 1: but uh, you know, certainly a lot of the time
Speaker 1: when you're seeing somebody emote on the screen, they are
Speaker 1: they're drawing on real emotions, real experiences that are in
Speaker 1: some way comparable to what their character is supposed to feel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's why a lot of times actors
Speaker 1: actually need time to say, get into and out of character.
Speaker 1: You know. They can't turn it off and on in
Speaker 1: an instant. I mean, I guess maybe some can, but
Speaker 1: a lot can't. They need they need a few moments
Speaker 1: to sort of gather themselves, to get in and then
Speaker 1: gather themselves once they get out. But yeah, So anyway,
Speaker 1: Darwin is suggesting here that the bodily manifestations of emotion,
Speaker 1: including the facial expressions, are not just a consequence of
Speaker 1: the emotions we feel, though they are that, of course, uh.
Speaker 1: And the fact that we have these outward uh signs
Speaker 1: of the emotions we feel, of course, is useful for
Speaker 1: communicating our emotional states to others, and this could be
Speaker 1: one very important biological role that these expressions play. But
Speaker 1: he says they also are involved in the regulation and
Speaker 1: maintenance of the emotions themselves. So a smile isn't just
Speaker 1: a consequence of feeling joy. The smile contributes to and
Speaker 1: sustains and modulates the feeling of joy. The tightened lip
Speaker 1: corner isn't just a result of our feeling of contempt,
Speaker 1: but it in some way makes us feel contempt. So
Speaker 1: it's almost like there are two dogs chained to each other,
Speaker 1: and if one moves the other one cannot help but
Speaker 1: be moved as well. Right, well, I mean according to
Speaker 1: to Darwin's view here, Yeah, so his ideas that the
Speaker 1: the bodily expressions don't just follow from emotional states. They
Speaker 1: they in part are the emotional states. They contribute to
Speaker 1: and control the emotional states. Yeah yeah, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll get into this some more. But I think that
Speaker 1: this is something that a lot of us can can
Speaker 1: point to times in our life where this either definitely
Speaker 1: feels true or other times where it definitely doesn't feel true. Like, um,
Speaker 1: for instance, I go to I go to yoga a
Speaker 1: lot I really enjoy and I think benefit physically and
Speaker 1: mentally from a yoga practice. And there are times where
Speaker 1: you're you're in a pose and a teacher may tell everybody,
Speaker 1: don't you know, don't forget to smile, smile, and then
Speaker 1: that'll change your sort of emotional uh participation with the pose.
Speaker 1: And in those situations, it it does feel sometimes like
Speaker 1: it helps on the other hand, I've had teachers who
Speaker 1: say that they they've stopped saying that because sometimes people
Speaker 1: in the class, you know, have bad experience with being
Speaker 1: told to smile. I mean, that's become very much a
Speaker 1: being harassed on the streets cliche of misogynistic behavior telling
Speaker 1: someone they should smile more telling someone they should smile,
Speaker 1: And it can be that alone. Yeah, I can feel
Speaker 1: no matter you know, you know, you know what what
Speaker 1: your your your gender happens to be, it's like being
Speaker 1: told to smile, as if that is just going to
Speaker 1: fix your problems, that's gonna totally change your your your mood.
Speaker 1: It can feel insulting, right, Like, surely my emotional state
Speaker 1: depends on more than just what my face is doing.
Speaker 1: And ultimately I think we all can agree it does
Speaker 1: being told to smile, and then smiling does not fix
Speaker 1: whatever caused you to frown to begin with. And then
Speaker 1: that's not getting into the case, you know, the situation
Speaker 1: that we do need to frown, we do need to
Speaker 1: have like the full uh spectrum of emotions. Right, that's
Speaker 1: certainly right, even if Darwin is correct, Like even if
Speaker 1: Darwin is right that the smile itself can give you
Speaker 1: some kind of feedback that in turn actually increases the
Speaker 1: positivity of your emotional state. The smile can make you happier.
Speaker 1: I mean that that doesn't necessarily mean it's good for other,
Speaker 1: like exogenous forces to try to coerce smiling on you,
Speaker 1: to tell you should be smiling, which I think can
Speaker 1: probably lead to all kinds of other emotions that could
Speaker 1: negate whatever positivity comes from the muscle movements that might
Speaker 1: be making you happier. So, as we're talking, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not talking just about smiles, but smiles do come
Speaker 1: up a lot in in the discussion here, so I
Speaker 1: thought it would be helpful to take a moment just
Speaker 1: talk about what a smile is. Um. You know, our
Speaker 1: smile is a bit different from the smile that we
Speaker 1: see expressed by our great ape brethren, where it is
Speaker 1: essentially a fear grin. Uh. You know it's it's often
Speaker 1: flashed when an individual is trapped or threatened, it to
Speaker 1: show of submission to more dominant members of the group,
Speaker 1: and you know it's it is then an admission of
Speaker 1: fear and a signal, uh, though a signal that doesn't
Speaker 1: just stand on its own. It's like part of a
Speaker 1: larger bodily signal that is expressed, uh as if to say,
Speaker 1: you know, I am not hostile, I'm not a threat.
Speaker 1: And I was reading a little bit about this neuroscientist
Speaker 1: um Michael Graziano, who have discussed on the show before.
Speaker 1: He has a wonderful Eon magazine article that discusses this topic,
Speaker 1: and he points out a number of things we've talked
Speaker 1: about here already. Also points out, you know that that
Speaker 1: even you know, with humans, people sometimes in subservient positions,
Speaker 1: will will smile a lot. You know, there's sort of
Speaker 1: the uh, you know, the the boot licking smile that
Speaker 1: we still kind of identify the idea of the obsequious smile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and so that in that it would seem
Speaker 1: that there are certain aspects of the great ape smile
Speaker 1: but haven't quite left us. Uh. You know. He points
Speaker 1: as well to shakespeare line from troy Less and Cressida
Speaker 1: quote they send their smiles before them to Achilles, uh,
Speaker 1: which which I think is is rather nice. So the
Speaker 1: human smile seems to have definitely emerged out of the
Speaker 1: same sort of thing. I mean, you know, we are
Speaker 1: we are primates after all. And of course, even though
Speaker 1: they're you know, a smile as a smile, as a smile.
Speaker 1: There are some cultural differences in the way smiles are
Speaker 1: perceived from one culture to another. Um. You we mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: Darwin mentioned babies earlier, and and certainly human newborns flash
Speaker 1: reflex smiles, but then social smiles come a little later,
Speaker 1: six to twelve weeks generally. Um. Yeah. Anyway, In this
Speaker 1: an article, uh, Graziano points out that, you know, most
Speaker 1: commentators agree that primate smiles are very old, and some
Speaker 1: think that it might have evolved out of an old
Speaker 1: or threatening display. But he thinks that if we focus
Speaker 1: too much on the teeth, we miss something else. Again,
Speaker 1: that full body display that is evident, right, It involves
Speaker 1: multiple regions of muscles in the face. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: stuff around the cheeks and the sides of the mouth,
Speaker 1: but also the eyes, right yeah, yeah, and even yeah,
Speaker 1: just like what you know, the full body is doing
Speaker 1: in the full uh you know, communication array that is
Speaker 1: the face in the head. So what do you proposes
Speaker 1: ultimately is that we're talking we're talking about here is
Speaker 1: a smile that's kind of a halfway point between not
Speaker 1: reacting to a display of dominance and fully reacting to it. Um,
Speaker 1: which which is? Which is interesting? It's almost like, um,
Speaker 1: you know, these these creatures learning to lie to each other,
Speaker 1: to deceive each other, you know. Um, here's a quote
Speaker 1: from where he's talking about like monkey A and monkey be,
Speaker 1: you know, hypothetically interacting. Quote. Monkey be can learn a
Speaker 1: lot by watching the reaction of Monkey A. If Monkey
Speaker 1: A makes a full blown protective response, cringe and all,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty good sign that Monkey A is frightened.
Speaker 1: He's uneasy, his personal space is revved up and expanded.
Speaker 1: He must view monkey B as a threat, a social superior.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, if Monkey A reveals only a
Speaker 1: subtle response, perhaps squinting and slightly pulling back his head,
Speaker 1: it's a good sign that Monkey A is not so frightened.
Speaker 1: He does not consider Monkey B to be a social
Speaker 1: superior or a threat. So the social signal evolves from here,
Speaker 1: and he drives home the quote. The primary evolutionary pressure
Speaker 1: is on the receiver of the signal, not the sender.
Speaker 1: The story is about how we came to react to smiles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, but it also raises all these other questions
Speaker 1: about So if we consider the evolution of the smile
Speaker 1: as having something to do with social signaling, and you know,
Speaker 1: it relates to the social relationships between animals that live
Speaker 1: in groups and interact with each other. Why is it
Speaker 1: that in in our lives at least, I would say
Speaker 1: the smile is very divorced from that original context where
Speaker 1: you smile by yourself all the time, you be completely
Speaker 1: alone and something makes you happy and you find yourself beaming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is true. Um. Now, we've discussed before though, how
Speaker 1: we might not laugh, though we might smile but not laugh,
Speaker 1: or at least that's a good point. The laughter might
Speaker 1: be and the smile might be more pronounced if there's
Speaker 1: someone else around, particularly you know, someone really know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were just talking about this before we started recording. Actually,
Speaker 1: how you know we we watched the Mystery Science Theater
Speaker 1: three thousand episode and we laugh if somebody else is
Speaker 1: in the room. It's still funny if nobody else is there,
Speaker 1: but you just don't laugh out loud. Yeah, I've Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of a time if I if
Speaker 1: I ever watched something and just really laughed out loud
Speaker 1: by myself, and how funny it is, like, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing comes to mind and in fact, I think I
Speaker 1: would feel weird if I did. I would feel like
Speaker 1: Sam Neil's character at the end of In the Mouth
Speaker 1: of Madness where he's uh in the movie theater. Sometimes
Speaker 1: Barbarian movies do it for me. I think I was
Speaker 1: laughing pretty loud by myself when I was watching Your
Speaker 1: Hunter from the Future. No, maybe you were just beside
Speaker 1: yourself with laughter. And therefore you know you have you
Speaker 1: know yourself to to communicate to um. So, so basically,
Speaker 1: Graziana points out, you know that from here it would
Speaker 1: have been an evolutionary arms race. Um And and this
Speaker 1: is a wonderful article, by the way, it's titled The
Speaker 1: First Smile. It's available, you know, Eddie and magazine and uh.
Speaker 1: He gets into laughter as well. But here's how he
Speaker 1: sums everything up. Quote. Evolution favors animals that can read
Speaker 1: and react to those signs, and it favors animals that
Speaker 1: can manipulate those signs to influence whoever is watching. We
Speaker 1: have stumbled on the defining ambiguity of human emotional life.
Speaker 1: We are always quite caught between authenticity and fakeery, always
Speaker 1: floating in the gray area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, I think it's helpful to think about
Speaker 1: the complexity of the smile, the mix of authenticity and fakeery. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we've just I think we've discussed fake smiles
Speaker 1: on the show before about how you know, there's this
Speaker 1: lack of micro expressive detail and a fake smile that
Speaker 1: you can pick up on. Um. But that to like
Speaker 1: truly fake a smile, you do have to summon some
Speaker 1: of the energy of the smile, you know. Um. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: it gets it gets very complicated, and especially in the
Speaker 1: human scenario, to to define exactly what a smile is
Speaker 1: in the degrees of smiling. Well, here's maybe a good question.
Speaker 1: Are all smiles on command fake smiles? Or are there
Speaker 1: are there cases where you smile on command and not
Speaker 1: because you know, you suddenly are overwhelmed by a feeling
Speaker 1: of positivity and joy and happiness. You know, you just
Speaker 1: smile because you need to. But it's not fake. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a good question. It's it's it kind of
Speaker 1: goes in with laughter as well, or at least kind
Speaker 1: of like the mild laughter. I think of like interactions
Speaker 1: with people, uh, you know, be be it at work
Speaker 1: or you know, strangers at a store, you know, the
Speaker 1: various social interactions that feel our lives. And I'll catch
Speaker 1: myself smiling, I'll catch myself, you know, laughing a little bit,
Speaker 1: even if there's not a joke, which seems strange, like
Speaker 1: maybe it makes me kind of feel like I'm the
Speaker 1: joker or something. Um, the man who laughs. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: in a good way, not in the Steve Miller way,
Speaker 1: but you know, in the Batman way. Um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: and you start teasing it apart, and you start asking yourself, well,
Speaker 1: was this authentic? Was this inauthentic? Or was it or
Speaker 1: is it like Graziano says, is somewhere in between? Like
Speaker 1: for for instance, um, I think one person wrote into
Speaker 1: us once and accused one or both of us a
Speaker 1: fake laughing at each other's jokes. Do you remember this?
Speaker 1: I don't remember this, and uh, um yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a while back, and I think only it was only
Speaker 1: one person that ever ever wrote in about it. And
Speaker 1: it just made me stop and think though, because I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: what we do here is is kind of a performance.
Speaker 1: You know, we're not reading from a script, We're having
Speaker 1: an authentic conversation, but it's a conversation knowing that someone
Speaker 1: else is listening to it, and like we we do
Speaker 1: make each other laugh, maybe we do lean into it
Speaker 1: a little bit. I don't know it. Like it basically
Speaker 1: comes down to exactly what Graziana said that it's it's
Speaker 1: not just fakery and authenticity, but there's this there's this
Speaker 1: huge area in between, and we may not even be
Speaker 1: aware of where we are on that spectrum in a
Speaker 1: given moment. Okay, I think we gotta take a break,
Speaker 1: but we will be right back with more than Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. Okay. So we've been discussing facial expressions emotions.
Speaker 1: Uh Darwin's writing on the relationship between facial expressions and emotions,
Speaker 1: or not just facial expressions, I mean all kinds of
Speaker 1: body expressions and physical manifestations and emotions. Um. And so
Speaker 1: this leads up to something that we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about for the rest of today's episode, which has
Speaker 1: come to be known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess to have a starting place, we should talk
Speaker 1: about what some of the acceptable emotions for discussions are,
Speaker 1: because obviously there are lots of complex emotions that might
Speaker 1: be you know, little shadings of other more basic emotions
Speaker 1: or combinations of feelings commonly acknowledged basic emotions in psychology,
Speaker 1: as categorized by the American psychologist Paul Ekman. Let's hear him,
Speaker 1: how about happiness, sadness, surprise, discussed, anger, and fear. There
Speaker 1: you got your big six. Now, other psychologists have offered
Speaker 1: slightly different lists, but I think this seems to be
Speaker 1: like a good starting place. These are like six widely
Speaker 1: acknowledged basic emotions, setting aside for a second that you know,
Speaker 1: different theories of what emotions actually are, which will come
Speaker 1: back to later in the episode. They're they're also like
Speaker 1: the constructionist ideas of emotions, which says, it's more like
Speaker 1: there's some kind of universal slider underneath all these and
Speaker 1: these are like categories that we apply to where that
Speaker 1: slider is. But for now, we're gonna work with those
Speaker 1: kind of six emotions and so put succinctly. The facial
Speaker 1: feedback hypothesis is the idea that quote an individual's experience
Speaker 1: of emotion is influenced by feedback from their facial movements. Now,
Speaker 1: there are tons of different versions of this hypothesis that
Speaker 1: have been articulated and tested over the years. We'll we'll
Speaker 1: get more into those differences later on. We know Darwin
Speaker 1: proposed something like this in the eighteen seventies, and it's
Speaker 1: been advocated by other important figures in intellectual history. The Seminal.
Speaker 1: American psychologist William James argued in his eighteen ninety work
Speaker 1: on on psychology that at least for the more basic
Speaker 1: or coarser emotions, emotions in a way simply are identical
Speaker 1: with the sensation of their physical manifestations in the body. Quote.
Speaker 1: If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to
Speaker 1: abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of
Speaker 1: its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind,
Speaker 1: no mind stuff out of which the emotion can be constituted,
Speaker 1: and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception
Speaker 1: is all that remains. So that this is a strange idea,
Speaker 1: but this did hold some sway for a long time.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that the feeling of an emotion is
Speaker 1: the feeling of changes happening in the body, including but
Speaker 1: not limited to the skeletal muscle. And this would center largely,
Speaker 1: but not entirely, on expressions that happen automatically in the
Speaker 1: facial muscles, but also all throughout the body. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: this does remind me that you know, when when one
Speaker 1: is smiling intensely um organically, you know you're not faking
Speaker 1: it at all, but like something is making you really
Speaker 1: smile and perhaps laugh really hard as well. There is
Speaker 1: a feeling of possession about it where you can imagine
Speaker 1: it's like this the physical um you know, symptoms are
Speaker 1: actually kind of like crunching your brain into this, uh,
Speaker 1: this pattern of thinking, like like you are you are happy?
Speaker 1: Now you are laughing? Now do you ever get the
Speaker 1: feeling like feeling happiness in the face in the way
Speaker 1: that if the emotion has a location, it kind of
Speaker 1: feels like it's somewhere behind the face and kind of
Speaker 1: or like it's a claw, Like it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a like a claw clamped over the face, like a
Speaker 1: xenomorph claw, uh, you know, an alien And and then
Speaker 1: you get to the point where your face is hurting
Speaker 1: a little bit, Like that is always a weird sensation
Speaker 1: where you're like, I'm I'm so happy and overcome by
Speaker 1: joy and it's physically hurting me. I wish it would stop. Well,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, I mean other emotions. I think
Speaker 1: we often do you not, at least I do associate
Speaker 1: fear with a feeling in the stomach and the gut.
Speaker 1: Do you not associate uh, sadness with kind of feelings
Speaker 1: in like the throat and the temples and behind the
Speaker 1: face also, Yeah, yeah, I mean with with with that being,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's often like there's a like a
Speaker 1: nasal activation. You know, we often don't want to think
Speaker 1: about that when we we think about, you know, weeping
Speaker 1: tears of joy, but it's often not just tears of joy.
Speaker 1: It's not of joy or a snot of sadness. But
Speaker 1: it's not nearly as poetic. But uh, but that's how
Speaker 1: it works. Uh. And in terms of like fear and
Speaker 1: you know, anxiety, I often think of it as more
Speaker 1: like a like a claw. Again, I guess it's claws,
Speaker 1: like I can't get pessive clause, but it's more it
Speaker 1: is more of an internal claw clutching not the face
Speaker 1: but the heart. I had no idea your psychic universe
Speaker 1: was all clause. Yeah, I mean that's I guess that's
Speaker 1: how I viewed the outside world. It's just a series
Speaker 1: of clause trying to um get to the heart of me. Uh.
Speaker 1: So William James also, like Darwin, addressed the subject of acting.
Speaker 1: So to to defend this idea, he brings up apathetical
Speaker 1: objection to his argument that goes something like this is
Speaker 1: so okay, So, William James, you say that bodily expressions
Speaker 1: of an of an emotion are identical to the feeling
Speaker 1: of the emotion. Wouldn't it follow then that an actor
Speaker 1: faking in emotion is exactly the same as somebody really
Speaker 1: feeling it? And uh And the way James phrases this
Speaker 1: is that any voluntary, cold blooded arousal of the so
Speaker 1: called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us
Speaker 1: the emotion itself. And James answers this objection by saying,
Speaker 1: first of all, you can't really test this because a
Speaker 1: lot of the bodily manifestations of emotions are in organs
Speaker 1: that we can't voluntarily control things in the you know,
Speaker 1: in the gut and the autonomic nervous system. He gives
Speaker 1: the example of tears. Most people can't cry on command,
Speaker 1: thus they can't actually perform a voluntary, cold blooded arousal
Speaker 1: of the physical manifestations in the body. But and there
Speaker 1: are some cases where we can control those manifits stations.
Speaker 1: And in these cases, James says, the problem with the
Speaker 1: objection is that it just assumes it's obviously wrong. The
Speaker 1: cold blooded arousal of the manifestations gives us the emotion itself.
Speaker 1: He does not concede that this is an absurdity. Instead,
Speaker 1: he writes, quote, everyone knows how panic is increased by flight,
Speaker 1: and how giving way to the symptoms of grief or
Speaker 1: anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes
Speaker 1: the sorrow more acute and calls forth another fit stronger still,
Speaker 1: until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with
Speaker 1: the apparent exhaustion of the machinery enrage. It is notorious
Speaker 1: how we work ourselves up to a climax by repeated
Speaker 1: outbreaks of expression. Refuse to express a passion and it dies.
Speaker 1: This is a famous quote. Here, uh count ten before
Speaker 1: venting your anger and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to
Speaker 1: keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture,
Speaker 1: sigh and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and
Speaker 1: your melancholy lingers. There's no more valuable precept in moral
Speaker 1: education than this, as all who have experience no. If
Speaker 1: we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we
Speaker 1: must assiduously and in the first instance, cold bloodedly go
Speaker 1: through the outward movements of these contrary dispositions which we
Speaker 1: prefer to cultivate. So this is sort of the origin
Speaker 1: of fake until you make it right yeah, or um yeah,
Speaker 1: or telling people to smile and they'll be happy. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's uh yeah, this this, I mean, he puts it
Speaker 1: so well, and my my response is both yes and no,
Speaker 1: like you know this, this feels absolutely true, but also,
Speaker 1: like you know, so many different objections pop up as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, for starters, just the idea of like, refused
Speaker 1: to express a passion and it dies. I mean that
Speaker 1: runs counter to a lot of at least you know,
Speaker 1: so certainly to the advice that is often given about
Speaker 1: passions and how we should not bury them inside of us,
Speaker 1: because it won't die if it is buried inside us,
Speaker 1: that it will find a way out, and it might
Speaker 1: not find its way out in in a in a
Speaker 1: way or at least at a time that is uh,
Speaker 1: that that that that is beneficial. Well, I I am
Speaker 1: also of two minds about this, um and the idea
Speaker 1: of yeah, refused to expression express a passion and it dies. Um.
Speaker 1: I think I've talked on the podcast before about how
Speaker 1: I'm often skeptical of the benefits of what people call venting,
Speaker 1: though at the same time, I don't think it's good to,
Speaker 1: you know, have strong feelings about something and have nobody
Speaker 1: to talk to them about, you know, and when you
Speaker 1: can't talk about something that is psychologically stressful, it's a
Speaker 1: burden on you. And so like, on one hand, you
Speaker 1: do need to be able to talk about things, But
Speaker 1: there's this thing people call venting, which is like something
Speaker 1: is bothering them and they just like continually express their
Speaker 1: frustration and a kind of repetitive pattern about it. I
Speaker 1: tend to notice throughout my life that this, in myself
Speaker 1: and in others, this doesn't actually make you feel better.
Speaker 1: That the venting process, I think most of the time
Speaker 1: just makes you matter and matter You work yourself up
Speaker 1: into a state where the problem assumes a larger posture
Speaker 1: than it did to begin with, and you're talking about
Speaker 1: like speaking aloud. That's sort of venting, because it seems
Speaker 1: like that sort of a venting has a very has
Speaker 1: a lot in common with the things that go on
Speaker 1: inside the mind and the default mode network. As we
Speaker 1: ruminate over something some worry we we we kind of
Speaker 1: rehearse for disasters, for example, or we um we essentially
Speaker 1: fantasize about terrible things occurring, and um, you know it's
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of the same practice, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's uh, you know, it's it's filling your mind with
Speaker 1: some sort of negative outcome, be be it, you know,
Speaker 1: you yelling at somebody or um, you know, we're bad
Speaker 1: things happening to you, kind of rehear source for disaster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the psychological process of rumination where you where you just
Speaker 1: like rehearse the worst possible scenarios in your mind over
Speaker 1: and over again is terrible. But then the idea here, though,
Speaker 1: is there could be like a feedback loop if you're
Speaker 1: actually if if you're expressing it bodily and facially, then
Speaker 1: it's just gonna potentially make things worse. Yeah, um, and
Speaker 1: I do think to some extent that's true. So yeah,
Speaker 1: obviously we're dealing with something that's very complicated and that's
Speaker 1: not a surprise because it involves emotions. I think emotions
Speaker 1: are I mean, we'll go ahead and say today, emotions
Speaker 1: are one of the most difficult things to study scientifically,
Speaker 1: I think, um and and so studies about them are
Speaker 1: often plagued with problems of inconsistency and how the emotions
Speaker 1: are characterized, how they're measured, How exactly do you quantify
Speaker 1: emotional states. It's one of the most difficult problems in
Speaker 1: all of science. I think, Yeah, how do you even
Speaker 1: agree on the basic terminology? And then if you end
Speaker 1: up creating something that seems like a useful explanation, is
Speaker 1: it ultimately just kind of you know, a system of
Speaker 1: metaphors to try and make sense of this thing. You know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the movie, the Pixar movie inside Out.
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen it. A wonderful movie about about emotions, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, but ultimately like there are not you know,
Speaker 1: a series of individuals inside of your head arguing with
Speaker 1: each other and going on adventures. Uh. So you know
Speaker 1: you worry too about like to what extent you end
Speaker 1: up like going too far in one of these directions
Speaker 1: and in really trying to uh you know, apply language
Speaker 1: to the the the n language complexity of the mind.
Speaker 1: But obviously, then again, emotions are one of the most
Speaker 1: important features of our entire lives, and so psychology should
Speaker 1: be taking a crack and understanding them. And so I
Speaker 1: guess that brings us back to the back to this
Speaker 1: question of the facial feedback hypothesis. If it's true that
Speaker 1: movements of the facial muscles or facial expressions do contribute
Speaker 1: to our underlying emotional states, they don't just follow from them,
Speaker 1: but they feed back into them and in some way
Speaker 1: control them. Is the evidence for that? Is there evidence
Speaker 1: that that's true? And I guess that's what we should
Speaker 1: discuss next. So one thing we absolutely do not lack
Speaker 1: for is studies on this subject. The facial feedback hypothesis
Speaker 1: is huge, and it's a very complicated subject with a
Speaker 1: massive and conflicting research history. There's no way to discuss
Speaker 1: all these studies. But in a minute we will be
Speaker 1: looking at a recent meta analysis paper that sort of
Speaker 1: gives an overview of these findings. Now, one thing is
Speaker 1: like problems with methodology we were just alluding to, and
Speaker 1: how you study things like the relationship between facial expressions
Speaker 1: and emotions. Of course, you can just ask people to
Speaker 1: smile or frown or do things with their face and
Speaker 1: then ask them how they feel. But these kinds of
Speaker 1: experiments would have some obvious limitations, right like if people
Speaker 1: are aware of being asked to smile, uh this knowledge
Speaker 1: could change how they report their feelings and it could
Speaker 1: buyas the results. You could have acquiescence bias, where you know,
Speaker 1: people in an experiment tend to just sort of try
Speaker 1: to figure out what the experimenters want and give them
Speaker 1: those types of results, or more generally, what are referred
Speaker 1: to UH as demand characteristics where but where things emerge
Speaker 1: in the research environment that would not emerge naturally. So
Speaker 1: different tests devised over the years have tried to get
Speaker 1: around this a number of ways, trying to like contort
Speaker 1: the facial muscles and see if that does something to
Speaker 1: emotional states without just saying, hey, you know, could you
Speaker 1: please frown for a minute and then we're gonna ask
Speaker 1: you to do a questionnaire. So, like, one type of
Speaker 1: thing is the pin in the mouth study. So here's
Speaker 1: one where you put a pin either between your lips
Speaker 1: or you put a pin between your teeth. When you
Speaker 1: put a pin between your lips. It just happens to
Speaker 1: form your face into a frown. When you put a
Speaker 1: pin between your teeth, it happens to induce the same
Speaker 1: muscles that you would use in a smile. So that's
Speaker 1: been used in a number of studies. Another thing is
Speaker 1: like asking participants to say a lot of certain vowels.
Speaker 1: For example, awe sounds incidentally produced smile posture and oh
Speaker 1: sounds incidentally produced frown posture. And some research has found,
Speaker 1: for example, that awe sounds people make people self report
Speaker 1: more happy or pleasant feelings. And I've even seen this
Speaker 1: connected to the prevalence of awe sounds and religious chance.
Speaker 1: I thought it was kind of an interesting uh idea there,
Speaker 1: like a halla, hallelujah kind of all kinds of I
Speaker 1: mean that awe sounds are more prevalent around the world
Speaker 1: in religious chants than ow sounds. And this could be
Speaker 1: because they induce more pleasant mental states. Now where does
Speaker 1: own fall them? I hopefully am would be between the
Speaker 1: two right, Well maybe, But out of this this huge
Speaker 1: history of of all these different studies, uh, just this
Speaker 1: year we got this big meta analysis pulled together tabulating
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirty eight different studies on the effect.
Speaker 1: It was by Nicholas A. Coles, Jeff T. Larson, and
Speaker 1: Heathersea Lynch, published in Psychology Coal Bulletin in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: And so, okay, you might think that given that many
Speaker 1: studies a hundred and thirty eight studies, now we should
Speaker 1: have a really solid body of evidence converging on a
Speaker 1: clear consensus answer. Uh And in one broad sense that's true,
Speaker 1: and in many more specific senses it's not true to
Speaker 1: quote the authors here. Unfortunately, more than a centuries worth
Speaker 1: of research has not yet clarified whether facial feedback effects
Speaker 1: are reliable. For example, researchers have produced a variety of
Speaker 1: theoretical disagreements about when facial feedback effects should emerge, but
Speaker 1: it remains unclear which, if any of these theories are correct. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: seventeen labs recently found that even the most seminal demonstration
Speaker 1: of facial feedback effects is not clearly replicable. Uh So,
Speaker 1: and this was a big problem. So like one of
Speaker 1: the biggest studies it was, it was a pin in
Speaker 1: the mouth study that found that, you know, putting a
Speaker 1: pin between the teeth made people report more happy emotions
Speaker 1: than putting it between the lips. Uh that that was big,
Speaker 1: But then just recently a bunch of abs tried to
Speaker 1: replicate it and they couldn't. So here here's this big
Speaker 1: question what all these studies add up to. So here's
Speaker 1: where this new meta analysis comes in. Quote amid this uncertainty,
Speaker 1: we provide a narrative review of research on the facial
Speaker 1: feedback hypothesis and a meta analysis of all available experimental evidence.
Speaker 1: So they're pulling all the studies together and trying to
Speaker 1: see if they can crunch the numbers and figure out
Speaker 1: what is shown overall. So I think maybe we should
Speaker 1: take another break and then when we come back we
Speaker 1: can get into the results of this study. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we're looking at a meta analysis of all
Speaker 1: of these uh, these different studies about facial feedback hypothesis
Speaker 1: and hopefully like some sense will emerge from it. All right,
Speaker 1: they we'll have some some some some general um you know,
Speaker 1: ideas that we can draw from it. Right, we will
Speaker 1: get some we there are other things that are left unanswered.
Speaker 1: So one of the things is that we we alluded
Speaker 1: to all these different problems and how you study something
Speaker 1: like the facial feedback hypothesis. Uh. Like, the authors identify
Speaker 1: four major theoretical disagreements in how people even approach the
Speaker 1: subject to begin with, I'll try to simplify them as
Speaker 1: briefly as I can. One is modulation versus initiation. Okay,
Speaker 1: So one one view says that emotions are maintained and
Speaker 1: modulated by body expression. So you're genuinely happy, You're feeling happy,
Speaker 1: and that makes you smile, and then the smile can
Speaker 1: maintain and intensify the happiness, or suppressing the smile can
Speaker 1: put a damper on the happiness. This is the modulation hypothesis. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the other view would say that at least some emotions
Speaker 1: can be created out of nothing with facial feedback alone.
Speaker 1: So maybe you're feeling neutral, but you make yourself frowned
Speaker 1: for five minutes and you actually end up feeling sad.
Speaker 1: This is the initiation hypothesis. So the author's note something
Speaker 1: interesting here that maybe we wouldn't have thought about otherwise. Uh.
Speaker 1: They know that this distinction assumes that emotional experiences have
Speaker 1: a beginning and an ending, that they are discreet rather
Speaker 1: than continuous and always in flux. Like, if you feel happy,
Speaker 1: can you pinpoint the moment when you started feeling happy
Speaker 1: And was there no happiness before or was it just
Speaker 1: something that got turned up in amplitude? But was there before? Uh?
Speaker 1: This is an interesting question, Like our emotions discrete things
Speaker 1: that can begin an end, or they part of a
Speaker 1: continuous media that's always in flux with maybe uh, And
Speaker 1: of course if they are, there's maybe no difference between
Speaker 1: initiation and modulation. Yeah, it makes me think it's like
Speaker 1: it's like a flow state and non emotional state. I've
Speaker 1: never heard it put like that. I don't have to
Speaker 1: think about that because generally when I think about being
Speaker 1: in a flow state, I think about it being happiness,
Speaker 1: because like it's you're content, you're not you know, you're
Speaker 1: totally wrapped up in the task at hand and you're
Speaker 1: not uh, you know, thinking about anything else. But then again,
Speaker 1: is it is it really happiness or is it like
Speaker 1: just sort of removal from the uh, you know, the
Speaker 1: wheel of emotions to some extent, disengaging from the default
Speaker 1: mode network, that's for sure. Uh. Yeah, And the default
Speaker 1: mode network sometimes just seems like kind of a roulette
Speaker 1: wheel of emotions stuff. It's just spin it and let's
Speaker 1: just see what what the what the universe has for
Speaker 1: me right now? Am I gonna be happy in the
Speaker 1: next minute? Or sad? It's like you or and feel
Speaker 1: like I just I have no idea for me. It's
Speaker 1: like which of your failures would you like to contemplate? Default? Okay,
Speaker 1: so next you've got discreet versus dimensional emotional experience. So
Speaker 1: our happiness, anger, sadness all that? Are they discrete categories?
Speaker 1: Do these basic emotions exist as sort of separate programs
Speaker 1: within the brain or can they all be reduced to
Speaker 1: some underlying phenomena presenting at different levels of intensity and valence.
Speaker 1: So the basic idea here is like, imagine you've got
Speaker 1: a couple of sliders in your brain. One is a
Speaker 1: slider that's the valence, is this positive or negati? And
Speaker 1: then the other slider is the level of arousal. Are
Speaker 1: you high high arousal or low arousal? And that those
Speaker 1: two sliders, positioned at different places, actually give you the
Speaker 1: things you think of as your normal emotions. The names
Speaker 1: of the emotions are just sort of like categories that
Speaker 1: we apply based on contextual clues. That's a possibility. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was thinking a little about this yesterday because I
Speaker 1: was working on another episode's notes and I was listening
Speaker 1: to a little Jackson Brown was playing um Fountain of Sorrow,
Speaker 1: and I had to stop. It's like because I was thinking,
Speaker 1: is this is this song making me feel good or bad?
Speaker 1: Is it making me happy or sad? It's like it's
Speaker 1: but it's neither, you know, it's it's this mix of both.
Speaker 1: Like it's a kind of a sad bittersweet song that's
Speaker 1: beautifully recorded and I have you know, nostalgia for it,
Speaker 1: but it's also you know, it's complicated. Yeah, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of moments where you can start to wonder
Speaker 1: if this is I think sometimes called like the constructionist
Speaker 1: or core affect uh idea of emotions where they're not
Speaker 1: these discrete programs running in the brain, but they they're
Speaker 1: the same thing. They're the same part of the same
Speaker 1: continuous quantity. And we just like apply categories to different
Speaker 1: zones on this graph basically uh and and depending on
Speaker 1: what the contextual clues are, because one level of high
Speaker 1: arousal and negative emotion in one state might feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, like anger and agitation, and in another state
Speaker 1: it might be more like sadness, intense sadness. But obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know which of these theories of
Speaker 1: emotion is the correct one. But that's another thing that's
Speaker 1: at play, and all these studies, people are working off
Speaker 1: different theories of emotion when they're trying to study whether
Speaker 1: emotions can be modulated or caused by facial movements. Next
Speaker 1: big question is awareness involved. If facial feedback does influence
Speaker 1: our emotions, do you have to be consciously aware of
Speaker 1: the face you're making or how you're moving your muscles,
Speaker 1: Like I feel myself smiling. I know that smile els
Speaker 1: mean happiness, so I feel happy? Or do these facial
Speaker 1: movements if the facial feedback hypothesis is correct, do these
Speaker 1: facial movements influence our emotions unconsciously through uh, you know,
Speaker 1: through feedback mechanisms that happen outside of our awareness. Huh. Well,
Speaker 1: in my experience, for whatever that's worth, I find that
Speaker 1: being aware of your happiness is once you're fire away
Speaker 1: to potentially bring it down. You know. It's a good point,
Speaker 1: like so, but but then again, I don't know how
Speaker 1: that but that actually relates to naither research here. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's hard to think yourself happy, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty easy to think yourself sad. Now, one thing we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier is like some of those studies are are
Speaker 1: aimed at trying to show that the the effect happens
Speaker 1: without conscious awareness, Like the pin in the mouth study. Right,
Speaker 1: If you put a pin between people's teeth and that
Speaker 1: makes them feel happier, obviously they're not going to be
Speaker 1: aware of the fact that they're smiling. They've just got
Speaker 1: a pin in their teeth. Uh, So that for what?
Speaker 1: And there were study that showed something like that, I
Speaker 1: think back in the nineteen eighties. However, that was the
Speaker 1: study that failed replication in recent years, so people tried
Speaker 1: to do the experiment again didn't get the same result.
Speaker 1: That means that either there was something wrong with the
Speaker 1: initial experiment or with all the replication attempts, or they
Speaker 1: could both be sound but arriving at different results because
Speaker 1: there's some important difference that's not being controlled for their
Speaker 1: So that that's something I don't know the answer to yet.
Speaker 1: I think I saw there might be a study that
Speaker 1: was trying to resolve whatever difference was going on there,
Speaker 1: but but I I didn't have time to look into that.
Speaker 1: One more big question, does facial feedback have an effect
Speaker 1: on affective judgments, so not just how you feel, but
Speaker 1: what you think about other things. You know, third parties,
Speaker 1: What what do you think about this cup? What do
Speaker 1: you think about this microphone? I'm sorry that a cup
Speaker 1: is so often an example that we invoke on in
Speaker 1: the moment here, and it's either going to be that
Speaker 1: or the foam soundproofing board. So so, but what do
Speaker 1: you think about these things? So, if our facial expressions
Speaker 1: modulate our emotions, do they do just that or do
Speaker 1: they also change the ways that we make judgments about
Speaker 1: these external objects, people and and situations. And the authors
Speaker 1: called this the affective judgments hypothesis. Uh dos frowning make
Speaker 1: you view another person more negatively? So obviously, all these
Speaker 1: theoretical disagreements make a meta analysis of the facial feedback
Speaker 1: hypothesis really difficult because despite how many studies there are now,
Speaker 1: they're not all testing exactly the same thing. They're not
Speaker 1: all working from the same theoretical framework. So the authors
Speaker 1: had to like code for all these differences in what's
Speaker 1: being tested in each study, as well as lots of
Speaker 1: other moderators, including how the facial feedback was manipulated. For example,
Speaker 1: you know, the pin and the teeth, or just asking
Speaker 1: people to do a facial pose, or even uh, experimenting
Speaker 1: with people who have had botoxic injections that restrict facial movement.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting one, yeah. Uh. And then other moderators
Speaker 1: like the timing of measurement, uh, the gender for example,
Speaker 1: some earlier research found that maybe men were more susceptible
Speaker 1: to body feedback on average than women. Uh, And whether
Speaker 1: subjects were aware of being video recorded and things like that.
Speaker 1: All right, so time for the results. Uh. The I
Speaker 1: would say the top line here is that some facial
Speaker 1: feedback effects seem to be real, but the effect is
Speaker 1: not huge. The overall body of research suggests that the
Speaker 1: effect is real, it is significant, but it's relatively small,
Speaker 1: and it's variable based on a lot of different things,
Speaker 1: like on these theoretical disagreements and moderating variables that we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. So just a few key selections from the
Speaker 1: specifics of the results. Uh. One is this question about
Speaker 1: initiation versus modulation, Right, can facial feedback only influence pre
Speaker 1: existing emotions or can it actually create new emotional experiences
Speaker 1: from a starting neutral state? And the evidence shows it
Speaker 1: can definitely do both. In fact, contrary to many historical
Speaker 1: predictions and assumptions, the initiation of emotions through facial posing
Speaker 1: is pretty well supported by evidence and seems to be
Speaker 1: pretty easy to demonstrate. So it's not just the modulation
Speaker 1: of what you're already feeling. You They've shown a bunch
Speaker 1: of times now that you can just take people, make
Speaker 1: them do a facial pose, and it does sort of
Speaker 1: generate an emotion from out of nowhere. However, there is
Speaker 1: more evidence for some emotions than others, like that there
Speaker 1: is evidence of a small facial feedback effect for most emotions,
Speaker 1: but not for a couple of key ones, surprise and fear.
Speaker 1: So people who make a happy face, the evidence shows,
Speaker 1: on average, will tend to feel more happy. But if
Speaker 1: you make a surprised face or a fearful face, there
Speaker 1: is not yet good evidence that you will feel those
Speaker 1: two emotions. Though the authors caution this conclusion because they
Speaker 1: say there aren't a whole lot of studies on the
Speaker 1: feedback effect for fear and surprise. Somehow, I can really
Speaker 1: see how this would be the case for surprise. I
Speaker 1: don't know how you could simulate prize just by putting
Speaker 1: a surprise face on the surprise seems so much more
Speaker 1: really dependent on actual facts of your surroundings. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: wonder if if part of this might be that they're
Speaker 1: just you know, if we go back to you know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about with Graziano and his um um,
Speaker 1: you know, monkey A and monkey B scenario. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: is there ever a necessity to to fake surprise? I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly if there's a surprise birthday party and you knew
Speaker 1: about it and you're like, oh yeah, or your people
Speaker 1: suck at that, right, Yeah, I mean we we do,
Speaker 1: like when you I think most of us, if we
Speaker 1: were asked to fake surprise, we would we would have
Speaker 1: a hard time doing anything convincing, you know, like it's
Speaker 1: generally the kind of thing where again it's a it's
Speaker 1: a surprise party that you knew about, or you're humoring
Speaker 1: like a child's um uh you know game, you know,
Speaker 1: of of scaring you or something, whereas faking um you know,
Speaker 1: these other emotions would have much more advantage and are
Speaker 1: much more a part of the human emotional deception tool chest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that it's right, though, I just do want
Speaker 1: to reiterate again their their caution that this may just
Speaker 1: be because there are fewer studies on on these emotions,
Speaker 1: and we don't know that in a really strong way.
Speaker 1: But the evidence for those two emotions is not as
Speaker 1: strong as it is for all the others. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I've ever been though accused of
Speaker 1: faking fear, you know, like no one said, No one's
Speaker 1: ever written in into the show and said you, I
Speaker 1: don't think you were really afraid when you were talking
Speaker 1: about this particular frightening concept. I think you're faking your fear.
Speaker 1: I've never thought about this before. But what emotion is
Speaker 1: most often acted badly in movies? What emotion are people
Speaker 1: the worst at trying to portray in a fictional scenario? Oh? Man,
Speaker 1: I've seen them. I've seen them all done poorly, and
Speaker 1: it contains spectacular in any case. I mean, with fear
Speaker 1: and surprise, you know, we can certainly think to really
Speaker 1: affect like when it's done well throughout, whatever acting method
Speaker 1: is employed, like, it really sticks in your mind. It's
Speaker 1: a reason that we mean, how many of us right
Speaker 1: now are thinking of Donald Sutherland from the the An
Speaker 1: Invasion of the Body Snatchers film. You know, it's such
Speaker 1: an iconic cinematic Uh, you know, moment of just absolute
Speaker 1: um fear, right. But a lot of directors actually go
Speaker 1: out of their way to create real surprises on sets
Speaker 1: for the actors when they want to get a truly
Speaker 1: shocked and surprised response. Like I'm thinking of the scene
Speaker 1: and Alien where the thing bursts out of John Hurt's chest. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know the first time the actors didn't know exactly
Speaker 1: what was going to happen in that scene. I think
Speaker 1: they thought something was going to happen, but they didn't
Speaker 1: have all the details. I think an important thing that
Speaker 1: Ridley Scott was going for there was trying to make
Speaker 1: sure that they got a real look of shock on
Speaker 1: their faces. May because even though they were all great actors,
Speaker 1: he didn't trust them enough with surprise. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: there are there are a number of different filmmaking stories
Speaker 1: about that right where where you end up having this
Speaker 1: rift between the actors and the director because the director
Speaker 1: assumes that they need to pull some sort of stunt
Speaker 1: to get that kind of emotion out of them. Was
Speaker 1: it the Exorcist where they were allegations or stories about
Speaker 1: like firing uh, like a firearm being discharged on the
Speaker 1: set to make all the actors beyond edge. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of bad stories about the production of
Speaker 1: The Exorcist. Okay, okay, we got to get back to this.
Speaker 1: So um a couple more things in their results. Is
Speaker 1: awareness necessary? Do you have to be aware that you're
Speaker 1: expressing an emotion on your face for the expression to
Speaker 1: influence your feelings? The results did not demonstrate that you
Speaker 1: have to be aware, but they also don't disconfirm there
Speaker 1: might be some role for self perception in some cases. Uh.
Speaker 1: Do facial movements influence affective judgments? You know, judging other things?
Speaker 1: The authors found that this question, unlike the general question
Speaker 1: of facial feedback, suffered from publication bias uh and so.
Speaker 1: And that's, of course, when studies confirming and effect are
Speaker 1: more likely to be published than the same studies if
Speaker 1: they had disconfirmed the effect, uh and so. When that
Speaker 1: bias was corrected for, the results did not yet indicate
Speaker 1: strong evidence for facial expressions changing affect of judgment. However,
Speaker 1: the authors caution against abandoning this line of inquiry because
Speaker 1: this one could be highly context dependent. They point out
Speaker 1: that there's some other research in psychology that suggests emotions
Speaker 1: only change our judgments about external stimuli in some contexts,
Speaker 1: maybe like when emotion seems relevant to the thing you're judging.
Speaker 1: More research is needed here to invoke a cliche. But
Speaker 1: then then they also talk about how their findings interact
Speaker 1: with some competing psychological theories on the nature of emotion,
Speaker 1: like we talked about earlier. Um, you know that this
Speaker 1: question of our emotions like happiness and anger and fear
Speaker 1: discrete programs within the brain, or are the contextual categorizations
Speaker 1: of different variations of intensity and valance with this more
Speaker 1: basic core affect And the results of the meta analysis
Speaker 1: show that facial feedback can influence not only reports of
Speaker 1: basic emotions, but dimensional reports that would be in line
Speaker 1: with the theory of emotions more based on core affect.
Speaker 1: So facial feedback doesn't really solve this question. As best
Speaker 1: I can tell, it could be consistent with either way
Speaker 1: of looking at what emotions are uh. They also found
Speaker 1: that results even within the same categories were fairly variable,
Speaker 1: suggesting that there were influences on these effects that are
Speaker 1: not recorded in the data and that they weren't able
Speaker 1: to test. And one example they give of what this
Speaker 1: might be is perhaps facial feedback effects are stronger in
Speaker 1: populations that are on average more quote attentive to their
Speaker 1: bodily cues, including but not limited to appropriate receptive cues
Speaker 1: from the face. And of course, appropriate reception is our sensation.
Speaker 1: You know, when we have more than five senses, right,
Speaker 1: it's one of the body senses that lets us know
Speaker 1: where the parts of our body are. It's how you
Speaker 1: can know where your hands are even when your eyes
Speaker 1: are closed. Um. And so it's this part of this
Speaker 1: appropriate receptive sense. Uh and and this could be an
Speaker 1: in fluencing factor. But the studies, of course haven't tried
Speaker 1: to record or measure this. And I take this to
Speaker 1: mean that people who have stronger senses of inter reception
Speaker 1: in general, the sensations within their own bodies, those people
Speaker 1: might be more sensitive to feelings created by the movements
Speaker 1: of the muscles in their face. And they also cite
Speaker 1: maybe different exclusion criteria on different studies could have influenced
Speaker 1: why some of the results are so variable. But they
Speaker 1: say in the end that quote, the cumulative evidence to
Speaker 1: date suggests that facial feedback does indeed influence emotional experience,
Speaker 1: given all the caveats we just talked about. So I
Speaker 1: think that's interesting. So like, what are some takeaways from
Speaker 1: this number one? We don't know yet when and why
Speaker 1: the effects will be largest, and in general the effects
Speaker 1: are real but kind of small. Though you could see
Speaker 1: how this knowledge could be applied to some kind of
Speaker 1: therapeutic uses. I think we probably don't know enough about
Speaker 1: it to to use it most effectively that way yet.
Speaker 1: But say, if you are trying ring to testincy, you know,
Speaker 1: could I make myself feel better by just making my
Speaker 1: face smile? It's it's at least one of those things
Speaker 1: where I think the risks and downsides associated with trying
Speaker 1: that out are probably extremely low, right, I mean, especially
Speaker 1: if you're not like to come back to the yoga example,
Speaker 1: like if one does experiment with smiling during certain poses,
Speaker 1: like you're not you're you're also doing all the yoga,
Speaker 1: you're doing the you know, there's also the experience of say,
Speaker 1: you know, working with the teacher, of being in the space.
Speaker 1: They're all these other factors that are contributing, and you're
Speaker 1: not going to make or break it uh necessarily by
Speaker 1: engaging and UH and this smiling exercise. UH. Likewise, I
Speaker 1: should point out though that that there are other things
Speaker 1: that exercise the one does with your your face that
Speaker 1: I would that could possibly play a role here, being,
Speaker 1: for instance, just moving your face around in hot ways,
Speaker 1: or making what is referred to his lion face, where
Speaker 1: you just make an exaggerated like uh, you know, childish,
Speaker 1: cartoonish monster face out of your own face, and like
Speaker 1: that can be kind of a way of potentially just
Speaker 1: like clearing whatever is physically going on with your face
Speaker 1: that could be exerting this mild influence on your emotional disposition. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I I wouldn't be surprised if there could be like
Speaker 1: a making monster faces in the mirror therapy kind of thing,
Speaker 1: Like you make your monster faces in the mirror, and
Speaker 1: then there's some kind of change in the emotional centers
Speaker 1: of the brain caused by these facial muscle movements. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like maybe it is I'm signaling, um, I mean to
Speaker 1: get back to the lion thing. Maybe it is some
Speaker 1: sort of like dominance and and um uh you know, aggression,
Speaker 1: it is related, or maybe it's simply like your brain
Speaker 1: is not that familiar with it, Like do I ever
Speaker 1: make lion face? Uh the rest of the time in
Speaker 1: my life? I don't think I really do. So maybe
Speaker 1: my I'm just I don't have like a bunch of
Speaker 1: you know, emotional material just like lined up for that
Speaker 1: particular facial feature. Yeah, and so I would emphasize again like,
Speaker 1: obviously we don't know how effective this could be in
Speaker 1: the long run. It like you say, you were trying
Speaker 1: to do something really serious like battle depression or something.
Speaker 1: We're not necessarily saying this is the fix because again
Speaker 1: the effects are small. We don't know exactly how effective
Speaker 1: it would be that kind of thing, or what ways,
Speaker 1: what ways you could manipulate the scenario to make it
Speaker 1: more effective. But like I said, this is something that
Speaker 1: does seem like a very low risk kind of thing
Speaker 1: to try if you are trying to manipulate your own
Speaker 1: moods and emotions, and certainly much you know, lower risk
Speaker 1: than a lot of the things people actually do to
Speaker 1: try to regulate their emotions, like self medicating with drugs
Speaker 1: and alcohol and all that. Right. Yeah, And of course,
Speaker 1: you know, again, I do want to come back to
Speaker 1: the fact that there are cultural differences in the way
Speaker 1: that we use smiles and um and react to smiles.
Speaker 1: So I mean that's always something to keep in mind
Speaker 1: as well, Like, is it a given culture aware smiling
Speaker 1: is done more given culture or even a given individual,
Speaker 1: where smiling when embarrassed and when embarrassed is more of
Speaker 1: a you know, a typical feature, Like how would that
Speaker 1: influence any of this? Yeah, I'm sure that could contribute. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then also thinking about like the full body scenario
Speaker 1: we're talking about earlier with the with the the hypothetical
Speaker 1: apes reacting to each other, Like if if you're dealing
Speaker 1: with a smile and it's just you know, some of
Speaker 1: these experiments and it's just isolated to the face, Uh,
Speaker 1: is that truly the expression or is the is this
Speaker 1: should the smile be part of a like a broader
Speaker 1: you know, physical manifestation. Well, another thing that makes me
Speaker 1: think of is uh, you know, this came up a
Speaker 1: little bit when we're thinking about the idea of research
Speaker 1: that used people who had botox injections in the face,
Speaker 1: uh to see you know, if that affected their emotional cognition.
Speaker 1: This makes me think more generally about the relationship between
Speaker 1: skeletal muscle in the face and throughout the body and
Speaker 1: our emotional states, and whether there could be relationships there
Speaker 1: that we don't fully understand yet, but that how you
Speaker 1: use your body contributes to your state of mind. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: But you know, the great thing about all this is
Speaker 1: that is that this is a wonderful area for individual
Speaker 1: experience and feedback this episode, Like everybody out there has
Speaker 1: experienced with emotions. And have you ever smiled? Have you
Speaker 1: ever smiled? Um? Have you ever frowned? I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: we've discussed cultural differences in individual differences, so I would
Speaker 1: I would love to hear some details about about that
Speaker 1: from folks out there. Um, you know, what are your
Speaker 1: experiences with being told to smile? What are your experiences
Speaker 1: with being you know, encouraged to smile during yoga? Or laughter?
Speaker 1: Yoga is a whole other area. You're talking more about
Speaker 1: laughter than than just smiling alone there, But that's very
Speaker 1: much a situation where the idea is pretend to laugh
Speaker 1: until you were laughing. And I've I've I've tried that.
Speaker 1: I tried it a few times, and I find that
Speaker 1: it works to like a reasonable degree. Like I don't
Speaker 1: feel like laughter has possessed me bodily, like there's some
Speaker 1: sort of a you know, a demon uh leeching into me.
Speaker 1: But I do find myself you're looking for, Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I've not that I'm necessarily look king for it,
Speaker 1: but I've seen I've seen people um overcome with laughter
Speaker 1: and scenarios like that. Like basically, when I was in
Speaker 1: high school, I think I visited a church with a
Speaker 1: friend where they were doing some form of faith healing.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what the terminology is for it, but
Speaker 1: where an individual would be touched by the pastor and
Speaker 1: instead of just simply like you know, falling to the
Speaker 1: floor being healed of their ailment, they would begin laughing hysterically.
Speaker 1: That was the physical manifestation of being touched with, you know,
Speaker 1: the Holy Spirit or whatever they the description was. So
Speaker 1: I guess I was kind of I could not help
Speaker 1: but think of that when engaging in laughter yoga. Uh
Speaker 1: And and so I just want to drive home that
Speaker 1: my experience was not a situation of being overcome by
Speaker 1: you know, out of control laughter. But then again, the
Speaker 1: priming wasn't there for that to be the case either,
Speaker 1: So you know, could be a situation where if I
Speaker 1: were entering into it and people were saying, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna do laughter yoga and you're gonna lose control of
Speaker 1: your body, then perhaps that would be more inclined to
Speaker 1: like to fall into that scenario. Laughter is weird. It's
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, it is. It is weird. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: something we can come back to again. So yeah, if
Speaker 1: you have any any tidbits from your life that you
Speaker 1: would like to share with us, let us know. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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Speaker 1: As always, to our excellent audio producer Terry Harrison, and
Speaker 1: to our guest producer today Michael. If you would like
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