The key facts

  • 1,201 people took part in the experiment, and 1,174 were included in the final analysis
  • A single unforced smile slightly improved mood, while repetition and the threat of a penalty wiped out the effect
  • Lead researcher Nicholas Coles links the findings to rules such as the requirement to smile at customers at Target stores

An experiment with kittens, fines, and ten smiles

The advice to smile to lift your mood works only in small doses: a single fake smile can help a little, while a series of forced ones makes a person unhappier and angrier. Psychologists at the University of Florida came to this conclusion, publishing their work in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

How the experiment was conducted

About the experiment reports Gazeta.Ru. A total of 1,201 people took part in the online study, of whom 1,174 were included in the final analysis. Volunteers were shown pleasant images — kittens and flowers — or unpleasant ones, such as scenes of theft and cruelty to animals. Some were asked to smile, while others were told to react naturally; the exercise was repeated once or ten times. Half of the participants were additionally threatened that $2 would be withheld from their $6 payment for an insufficiently convincing smile — in reality, everyone was paid in full.

The effect depended on context

Against the backdrop of unpleasant images, a single smile did indeed lift the mood slightly — even among those threatened with a pay cut. Repetition diminished the benefit, and combined with the financial threat it erased it entirely. Against the backdrop of pleasant images, a single voluntary smile did not change the mood, but repeated or forced smiles made participants unhappier than a natural reaction and increased irritation and anger.

What the authors say

“If you make yourself smile just once with no penalties, happiness increases — what psychologists have seen in laboratories is true,” said the study's lead author Nicholas Coles. “But as soon as the conditions are brought closer to the real world, where you have to smile again and again and your pay is docked for a bad smile, everything completely reverses.” According to the outlet, the irony is that Coles spent years studying the benefits of smiling, while in his youth he worked in the service industry and once received a reprimand for not smiling enough while serving visitors at an amusement park in Florida.

Connection to real-world rules and caveats

The authors link their findings to real-world scandals: the Target supermarket chain was criticized for requiring employees to smile at customers when they came within a certain distance. According to Coles, such rules strip emotional freedom from both workers and customers, who are forced to respond to fake friendliness. Instead of chasing a good mood, he suggests valuing what one already has more often: in his observation, society places a huge bet on feeling happier and far less on the ability to be content with what one has. It should be noted that the findings come from a single online experiment; the publication does not report any replications on other samples.