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by Dylan16807 3583 days ago
> if someone found smiling could curtail depression I'm sure they'd win the Nobel prize.

You're reading way too far into that. If something brings you from -100 to -95 it's notable but not world-changing. yamike didn't say anything about actually fixing the depression, just adding a slight bit of happiness.

> I think it's evident

Are you basing that on anything? There's a reason we're actually doing this study and not just reasoning out the answer.
1 comments
cairo_x 3583 days ago
You don't think it's evident people smile to make others feel more comfortable? (Sounds like a question in an Autism checklist)

And on the other side of the coin: You don't find it rather ironic that you discount experiential self-reporting in this thread, yet psychology relies on it so heavily?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_inventory#Problems

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Dylan16807 3583 days ago
>You don't think it's evident people smile to make others feel more comfortable? (Sounds like a question in an Autism checklist)

That is not what the post I replied to said, and I especially want a citation for the "bottling things up" portion.

>You don't find it rather ironic that you discount experiential self-reporting in this thread, yet psychology relies on it so heavily?

I don't see any irony once we remove the oversimplifications. It's a terrible data source so we need a whole lot of data points and careful collection to get anything meaningful. We can still use it, but we very much need to discount single anecdotes and going by what's 'evident' without checking.

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cairo_x 3583 days ago
Bottling things up, with regards to depression -- pretending to be what you are not -- is exhausting. If you don't have depression exhaustion can be overcome. A big part of depression is the inability to recover from stress, therefore pretending to smile, over time, would be obviously detrimental to depression. I know this from experience.

The studies on depression and stress are many and numerous, although they are neuroscientific in nature (actual science).

No offence dude, but the field of psychology is to neuroscience as alchemy is to chemistry and physics. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

PS: Psychology has done a pretty good job of getting depression wrong at every possible turn. And people like me have been the butt of their half-baked ideas since the beginning. gives psychology the middle finger

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