| > that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling. It likely means there's no inner emotional effect from just the specific measured physical activation of facial muscles. Part of the problem here is, as they say, that we don't know why it failed to replicate. I saw Strack and Martin's complaints in part at least as finding that to be a concern: Maybe there genuinely is no effect, or maybe the effect they originally measured is down to something subtle that was different due to all the changes in the experimental setup. Personally I think that's a big flaw in the replication attempt: They ought to have at least included a couple of groups that followed the original setup as closely as humanly possible, to see whether that would give different results. In any case, they were measuring something very specific: Whether forcing subjects to put their facial muscles into something resembling a smile while they are unaware of being made to smile will cause them to subsequently be more likely to judge a comic funny. Can that can be extrapolated to the question of whether smiling will make you happier? Maybe. Maybe not. Is it relevant to situations where people decide to smile with the intent of trying to force an emotional change? No idea. Is it relevant to situations where people realise that they have been smiling without knowing why? No idea. Is it relevant to situations where forcing a smile triggers social feedbacks that affect your emotions (e.g. people smiling back)? Probably not at all, but who knows. It's very possible that the failure to replicate genuinely means the original result was flawed, without it actually telling us anything about typical real world situations that people wrongly interpreted the original paper to apply to. This is perhaps a bigger problem: The original finding has been spun so much over the years into something it was not. They specifically tried to "engineer away" peoples knowledge about whether or not they were smiling or of someone trying to affect their emotional state. And that's fine for their original purpose, but it's not very relevant to most of the situations that people have subsequently tried to apply the spun version of the results to. |