A Genuine Smile Found To Improve Health, Happiness

Smiling can improve mental health and boost happiness, but experts at a recent conference were split on whether it must be genuine or not. Psychologists frequently counsel depressed patients to “fake it until you make it”, meaning act happy until one genuinely feels happy. However, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson disagrees.

Speaking at a recent Positive Psychology conference in the U.K., Dr. Fredrickson discussed smiling with several colleagues, including Dr. Suzy Greene. While Dr. Fredrickson acknowledges the health benefits of smiling, the expert on positive emotions says that a smile must be genuine, in order to have the best health benefits. She credits the positive emotions behind the smile with making patients healthier, and claims that there is no benefit to a fake smile. In fact, it may make the patient feel worse, underscoring bad feelings. Dr. Fredrickson is head of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina.

Psychologist call the genuine smile a Duchenne smile. They measure smiles by assessing the muscles used, often in photographs or in video. Research done by Dr. Fredrickson and Dr. Suzy Greene indicate that only positive emotions produce the health-giving Duchenne smile.

According to Dr. Greene of the University of Sydney, one study found that insincere smiles – and the negative emotions behind them – can be bad for one’s heath. Patients who displayed fake smiles were more likely to have problems with heart function that sometimes predicted serious or even fatal outcomes.

In contrast, the two researchers found that joy, gratitude and contentment boost physical as well as mental health. “Positive emotions are mind and body events,” Dr. Frederickson said. She noted that the positive interpretation of events leads to a biochemical cascade that affects many body systems. That boosts immunity and improves cardiovascular health.

Additional research has shown that positive emotions improve learning and decision-making. Individuals who experienced positive emotions in daily life were less likely to catch a cold. This was true, even when the person’s level of stress or negative emotions was also high.

Those who experienced high levels of positive emotion were able to recover from a heart attack more quickly than those who had few positive emotions. According to research in Australia, subjects who genuinely smiled for a group photo had greater well-being and were healthier, even 30 years later. They even lived longer than those with fake smiles did.

By Joni Holderman, [email protected], contributing reporter for Mental Health News.