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The Humintell Blog May 30, 2023

Can Smiling Improve Your Mood? Research Says Yes.

Emotions and Facial Expressions

We all know that emotions give our lives meaning, and life without emotions is impossible to imagine.

Emotions are a vestige of our evolutionary history and are primarily controlled by an archaic part of the brain.

This is why Dr. Matsumoto describes emotions as immediate, involuntary, automatic, and unconscious reactions to things that are important to us.

Emotions help us react in some situations with minimal conscious awareness and are triggered by a universal, underlying psychological theme.

When triggered, they recruit an organized system of reactions that produce specific physiological signatures, direct our cognitions, and produce specific types of feelings.

Importantly, emotions produce specific, nonverbal behavior in the face, voice, and body.

Different emotions are expressed by different, specific, unique facial configurations (facial expressions) that are universal to all cultures, regardless of race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender or any other demographic variable.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

If emotions produce specific universal facial expressions, can facial expressions in turn affect your emotions? According to the facial feedback hypothesis, they can.

But is this actually true?

Scientists have been interested in the idea of a facial-feedback hypothesis since the 1800s (Source: Betterhelp) and modern researchers have continued to study the hypothesis to this day.

Smiling is Good for Your Heart

One study conducted by clinical psychologists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman showed the positive effects of smiling. Turns out, smiling can be good for your heart in stressful situations.

How Masks Hinder Politeness For their study, the researchers examined participants’ heartbeats, since stress and heart health are related.

17o participants were split into 2 groups: one knew what the study was about, while the other didn’t.

In the training stage, the researchers taught the volunteers how to either hold their faces in a neutral expression, hold a social smile (upper right hand image), or hold a Duchenne smile (upper left hand image).

The researchers monitored the participants’ heart rates as they performed various tasks; both groups were required to use their hand to quickly trace a star reflected in a mirror, followed by placing their hand in a bucket of ice water for one minute.

While completing these tasks, each person had to hold chopsticks in their mouth which activated muscles corresponding to a forced smile.

They found the participants who were instructed to smile, and in particular those whose faces expressed genuine or Duchenne smiles, had lower heart rates after recovery from the stress activities than the ones who held their faces in neutral expressions.

Even the volunteers who held chopsticks in their mouths, that forced the muscles to express a smile (but they had not explicitly been instructed to smile), had lower recovery heart rates compared to the ones who held neutral facial expressions.

Interestingly, those who smiled genuinely during the trial recovered the fastest, followed by people with fake (social) smiles. Those with neutral smiles had the slowest recovery.

Even Fake Smiles Can Improve Mood

Recent research also suggests that fake or social smiling can make people feel happier.

An international collaboration of researchers led by Stanford University research scientist Nicholas Coles published a study in Nature Human Behavior.

As part of the Many Smiles Collaboration, a total of 26 research groups from 19 different countries and over 3,800 participants were involved. The average age of the participants was 26 and over 70% were women.

The researchers created a plan that included three well-known techniques intended to encourage participants to activate their smile muscles:

One-third of participants were directed to use the pen-in-mouth method
One-third were asked to mimic the facial expressions seen in photos of smiling actors
The final third were given instructions to move the corners of their lips toward their ears and lift their cheeks using only the muscles in their face

In each group, half the participants performed a small physical tasks and simple math problems while looking at cheerful images of puppies, kittens, flowers, and fireworks, and the other half simply saw a blank screen.

They also saw these same types of images (or lack thereof) while directed to use a neutral facial expression. After each task, participants rated how happy they were feeling.

After analyzing their data, the researchers found a noticeable increase in happiness from participants mimicking smiling photographs or pulling their mouth toward their ears.

Interestingly, the researchers didn’t find a strong mood change in participants using the pen-in-mouth technique but the evidence from the other two techniques was clear.

It provided a compelling argument that human emotions are somehow linked to muscle movements or other physical sensations.

For more on how smiling boosts your mood, visit this past blog post

The post Can Smiling Improve Your Mood? Research Says Yes. first appeared on Humintell.

The Humintell Blog April 19, 2023

Does Music Elicit Universal Emotional Responses?

It’s no mystery that major and minor chords in western music makes us feel good. But could this be because of an evolutionary trait?

Recent research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests this could be the case.

Turn to any major pop radio station in the Western world and you’ll likely recognize some familiar features in the songs including:

A formulaic structure
Themes of romance
A catchy melody in a major scale
A song less than three and a half minutes

These unique features of modern music are designed to make the audience feel good, so we listen on repeat. But why do these songs make us feel good?

For the last few decades, psychologists have wondered if there are features to music that elicit universal emotional responses in humans.

Could certain elements of music be hard-wired into the human central nervous system?

A Musical Study

A recent study tested how different communities with varying levels of exposure to Western music would respond emotionally to major melodies and minor melodies. According to Discover Magazine, “At least in Western cultures, major and minor melodies and harmony heavily influence emotional responses to music. Major chords and progressions are associated with positive emotions, and minor chords and progressions are associated with negative emotions.”Smit and colleagues asked musicians and non-musicians in Sydney, Australia as well as different communities from Papua New Guinea with varying degrees of exposure to Western music, to associate major and minor melodies with either happiness or sadness.

The Results

The researchers found that the degree of familiarity with Western music corresponded with the association between major melodies with happiness, and minor melodies with sadness.

While this association was present for some groups in Papua New Guinea, researchers did not find evidence for this association in the community that was the most remote.

This study suggests that familiarity through cultural exposure plays and important factor when associating major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness respectively.

Interestingly, major chords tend to appear more frequently than minor chords in popular music and research shows that humans are likely to attribute positive emotions to things that we are familiar with.

Universality in Music?

Lead researcher Smit also thinks there could be some associative conditioning at play. She makes the important point that people typically don’t listen to music in isolation. Instead we listen to music that fits the context of our situation.

For example, we would usually hear major music at an event like a wedding, whereas we might hear minor music at a funeral.

If specific features of music are combined with emotionally laden events often enough, then we will likely associate that musical feature with that specific emotion.

Some psychologists have suggested that music was a sort of social glue in our evolutionary history, helping to facilitate the development of humans as a deeply social species.

While this study does support that culture reinforces the association between major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness, Smit does note that, “there is still absolutely the possibility that particular aspects of music might be universal.”

Universal Emotions in Music

In similar research conducted in 2016, Psychologist Heike Argstatter sought to determine whether universal basic emotions are recognizable in music across cultures.

This study built on her previous research which found that, within one Western culture, both trained musicians and laypeople consistently categorized the same musical sequences into categories based on the same basic emotions.

Dr. Argstatter then sought to extend these findings to audiences in disparate cultural settings.

The results? Dr. Argstatter found evidence that all participants, regardless of culture, would identify the same emotions in the same pieces of music. This was especially true for happiness and sadness.

The post Does Music Elicit Universal Emotional Responses? first appeared on Humintell.

The Humintell Blog March 23, 2023

Disgust and Fear Linked To More Acidity In Stomach

We’ve all experienced “gut feelings” but a new study out of Sapienza University supports the idea that these feelings could be tied to physiological changes. Researchers in Rome investigated how emotional states such as disgust and fear could affect acidity levels in the gut.

The Methodology

Giuseppina Porciello and her team asked 31 men whose average age was 24 to take a pill that measures pH levels in the gut.

The men then watched videos that elicited feelings of disgust, fear, and happiness while the pill sensor travelled down their gastrointestinal tract.

After watching each video, the men completed a questionnaire to rate the intensity of their emotions.

The Results

After watching the videos that elicited feelings of disgust and fear, the participant’s stomach pH level wasmore acidic than it was at a baseline measurement.

Those with the most acidic pH reported feeling the most disgusted and fearful. It is unclear whether a particularly acidic stomach heightens these emotions or if experiencing these emotions results in more acidity.

The participants who reported feeling happy, regardless of the video they watched, had a less acidic pH in their stomach.

Porciello and her team are now carrying out a similar study on female participants.

The Brain/Gut Connection

This research reinforces models that suggest the gastric network plays a major role in our body’s emotional responses.

As stated by the Harvard Medical School, the gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.

The brain has a direct effect on the stomach and intestines. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach’s juices before food gets there.

Feeling disgust in the pit of your stomach isn’t unusual. In fact, self-reported ‘body maps’ of emotions often associate negative emotions with the gastric system.

It’s not just a mental thing either – recordings of the electrical activity in the gut’s muscular wall also reflect our experiences of revulsion.

Our bodies appear to be driven to ramp up gastric activity when we experience things we ought to stay clear of, evoking a sense of nausea.

Universal, Psychological Themes

It’s important to remember that research has demonstrated that, despite many differences (and similarities) in the specific types of events that trigger emotions in us, there are universal, psychological themes associated with each of the seven universal emotions – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

A psychological theme is the basic, most elemental way in which our minds process and evaluate any event in terms of what the event means to us psychologically. These themes are mostly concerned with our welfare.

The fact that there are universal, psychological themes associated with basic emotions means that the same underlying, psychological themes trigger the same emotion in all humans around the world, regardless of differences in race, culture, nationality and any other demographic characteristic.

So what are some quick descriptions of themes for the basic emotions of disgust and fear?

Disgust – Contamination

Disgust is triggered when our minds appraise something that is dirty, rotten, offensive, or contaminated.

Fear – Threat

Fear is triggered when our minds appraise something as threatening, or potentially threatening, or sense of self. The sense of self that is threatened can be our physical self as well as our psychological self.

To see the other triggers for universal emotions click here.

The post Disgust and Fear Linked To More Acidity In Stomach first appeared on Humintell.

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