'Faking It' Helps Emotions Become Real

Hiding your true feelings isn't always the best thing to do. Previous studies have shown that masking emotions can have a negative effect on your physical and mental health down the road. Yet did you know that faking a smile every once in a while even when you're not happy can help bring positive vibes to your life? Recent findings published in the journal Acta Psychologica show that acting out positive emotions can sometimes help people remember them, bringing about positive occasions.

"Theories of embodied emotion state that in order to process an emotion we first reproduce the facial movements of the expression induced by that emotion," said lead study author Jenny Baumeister from the International School of Advanced Studies, in a news release. "In practice, if we watch someone smiling, we tend to smile as well in order to appreciate what that person is feeling. We applied this finding to memory and assessed whether it is also true when we're trying to recall an emotion."

Participants were asked to complete memory tasks that involved emotions, with their faces either completely free or molded by a mask designed to be similar to ones normally used in cosmetics, according to study authors.

The study results revealed that participants performed significantly worse on the tasks when fitted masks that were compared to their faces were "free."

"The data confirm the hypothesis that 're-enacting' the motor pattern associated with the emotion helps to recall that emotion. This suggests that even during the storage phase of memories, we also encode the motor information and re-use it during retrieval," concluded study coordinator Professor Raffaella Rumiati.

For more great nature science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).