Somatic Feedback
Ask average folks how emotions work – about the causal relationship between feelings and behavior – and they’ll say we smile because we’re happy, we run because we’re afraid. But work by psychologists shows the truth is often the reverse: what we feel is actually the product, not the cause, of what we do. It’s called “somatic feedback.” Only after we act do we deduce, by seeing what we just did, how we feel. However, new research suggests there may be limits to our ability to proactively manage our own well-being. As expected, across the experiments, the researchers found that the more people smiled, the happier they reported being. But only some people.
Surprisingly, for a section of the population, smiling actually reduced well-being. The more these people smiled, the less happy they were. Who are these people for whom extra smiling fails to generate corresponding increases in joy? In the answer lies the ultimate irony. It turns out that the gloomiest people were those who believed in precisely that somatic feedback hypothesis described above. People who realized, in other words, that you can “smile to feel happy” (called proactive smilers) were exactly those who did not enjoy the benefits of the theory they espoused. On the other hand, for those who believed that smiling is a genuine indicator of mood – those who subscribed to commonsense notions about the causal order of action and emotion (reactive smilers) – smiling boosted happiness.