White card. After a stressful day, have you ever become aware of the number of times you tightened the jaw or frown? On the other hand, on vacation, relaxed, you are probably much more smiling. These facial expressions that we produce permanently reflect our emotions in a relatively faithful way. But could it be that the opposite is also true? Could our emotions result from our facial mimics?
Since the nineteenth century, the researchers are asking this question. Can our facial expressions determine our mental states? Illustrious scientists like Charles Darwin or William James have suggested that the perception we have of our physical states is at the origin of our emotional feelings. Darwin thought that being inhibited in the realization of a facial expression could reduce the emotional feeling. In this, these illustrious researchers were the precursors of Facial Feedback (HFF), a proposed hypothesis much more recently and that the production of facial expressions and their return perception (feedback influence the emotional feeling. Feeling our muscular contractions at the origin of a smile so would suggest that we are happy.
Inhibit the expressions
Fritz Strack, from the University of Mannheim, Germany, and his colleagues have recorded the emotional feeling of participants according to their ability to produce expressions. The participants had to evaluate the comic of a situation by holding a pencil between their lips, between their teeth or in the hand. The results show that preventing a subject from smiling pushes him to judge a situation as less funny. Joshua Davis and his colleagues at Columbia University subsequently confirmed these results by presenting funny or sad videos to participants who were placed on his face. To push them to inhibit their facial expressions, they were explained in a very fallacious way as the electrodes would be ineffective if they contract their muscles. Here again, the results are formal, in the absence of facial expression production, the emotional feeling is significantly decreased.
Ralf Rummer, from the University of Erfut, and his German colleagues have postulated that when one pronounces an “I”, we make the same mimicy as when one smiles, while the ” o “would correspond more to negative emotion. These authors point out that the words in “I” have a positive connotation in several languages (“Dear”, “Sweetie”, “darling” …) while the words in “O” (“No”, “Stop” , “Ho!”) report a danger. Starting from this hypothesis, these authors showed funny or sad videos to topics they asked to invent pseudo-words. And, as would be expected, the participants at whom we had induced a positive emotion have invented words containing more than “i” while those who had been exposed to sad videos have invented words with more than “O”.
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