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The Pencil Trick for Happiness

Feeling down? Here's a handy trick: Stick a pencil between your teeth. Push it all the way to the back of your mouth, so that it pushes against your cheeks. Make sure that you are holding the pen in place with your teeth, not just your lips. Now hold that position for a minute. See if your attitude toward things that you are thinking about becomes more positive. In a famous study, psychologists Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper found exactly that: students who held a pencil in their mouths this way rated cartoon drawings to be funnier than those who read the same cartoons without the pencil. The explanation is that holding a pencil in your teeth this way forces your lips back into a "Duchenne smile," which is considered a "true" or non-forced smile. Holding the pencil with your lips doesn't have the same mood benefit, because it approximates a forced smile instead of a genuine one!

Another line of research on facial expressions has found that botulinum toxin (BOTOX) injections can improve mood by freezing the facial muscles involved in frowning, such as a furrowed brow. In this case, an inability to frown helps to prevent negative emotions coming to the surface. Effects have been found in the amygdala, part of the brain's fight-or-flight response system, which becomes less reactive when the face's frowning muscles are paralyzed in this way. Deliberately furrowing the brow by trying to hold up golf tees with your eyebrows has the opposite effect. And the effect of BOTOX is not purely chemical, because when it is used to smooth out "laugh lines" around the eyes, then mood becomes worse instead of better -- a potential side effect of cosmetic BOTOX use.

We usually see a person's facial expression as a reflection or result of his or her emotions, not as a cause of those emotions. These findings demonstrate that the effect can work the other way. The actual experience of an emotion involves a fair amount of nonspecific physical arousal: At the Intuitive-mind level, we simply feel like we are feeling something. The Narrative mind then puts a label on the feeling: Oh, I just saw something amusing, so that feeling must be happiness. Simply having a label for a feeling can clarify and increase it. Positive emotions also tend to be self-perpetuating, so when we start to feel happy we interpret ambiguous situations more positively, which makes us feel happier yet; a state of happiness can even help people to resist the negative effects of pain. The same type of self-perpetuation of mood states occurs on the negative side, where people who feel down tend to ruminate, which makes them feel even worse. Labeling a mood state as positive or negative, then, can have real effects, and even a small experimentally-induced mood change based on facial expressions might result in someone having a much better or much worse day than they would have beforehand.

Psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer demonstrated the role of the Narrative system in emotions with a 1962 study in which they injected people with epinephrine (adrenaline) under the pretext of testing a new drug to improve their eyesight. Participants then interacted with a confederate of the investigators, who either provoked them or acted giddy with happiness. The participants all experienced physiological symptoms like racing heartbeat, shaking, and quick breathing, because that’s what epinephrine does to the body. But their emotional experience varied based on the social context: Those who interacted with the angry confederate interpreted their own physical experiences as being angry themselves. Those who interacted with the happy confederate were more likely to say that they themselves felt happy. In subsequent studies, the happiness condition hasn’t held up as well on replication as the ability to experimentally induce negative emotions. And when studies included a control group that told participants what to expect with epinephrine injections, those people were no more likely to report any emotion. Instead, they simply wrote off their experiences as side effects of the drug. The same sympathetic nervous system activation, then, could be interpreted in many different ways depending on the social context and the explanation provided.

The Intuitive mind produces an immediate reaction to any new situation, and I have argued that the speed of the Intuitive mind excludes people's conscious Narratives from any role in their immediate behavior. Most interventions, therefore, might be expected to work at the level of the Intuitive mind. I have written before about how we might use practice to train ourselves to react differently, or how consequences can shape future behaviors based on the results of each new attempt. But investigators who followed in the footsteps of Schachter and Singer have shown that there’s another way to modify emotions, by giving the Intuitive mind reasonable explanations for how one is feeling. An emotional reaction is still an Intuitive-level experience, but it is an unformed or ambiguous one that often just involves activation of the sympathetic nervous system. The Narrative mind then pulls together multiple sources of information to provide an emotion label, including data on the current position of the facial muscles and information from the social context in which the emotion occurs. By modifying those additional stimuli, which are potentially separate from the stimulus that provoked the original emotion, we can provide a ready-made hypothesis for the Narrative mind to latch onto in an ambiguous situation.

The fact that emotional experiences are partly Narratives is not to say that you can simply tell yourself to feel happy and expect that to work — you probably can’t. But you can perhaps smile your way to happiness. The Narrative mind is a compulsive storyteller: Give it some additional data, regardless of the source, and it will weave that information into its ongoing story about how you are currently feeling and how you ought to behave.

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