A fake smile might cheer you up. Why did ten people feel more irritated when it came from their boss?

We have all been in situations where we gave a fake smile to someone out of peer pressure or for a formality. Sometimes we smiled fake to pose for a photo and sometimes just to get through that mandatory office lunch. Have you ever seen someone who fake smiled and was paid for it?

Nicholas Coles used to smile for a living. While studying psychology, he worked at a Florida theme park where greeting visitors with a smile was part of the job. He told Newsweek that one visitor screamed at him in front of hundreds of people. He was still expected to smile for the next guest. Years later, Coles, who is now a psychologist at the University of Florida, put a version of that experience to the test. His team found that a fake smile could briefly lift people’s mood. When participants had to keep smiling and thought their pay was on the line, they reported less happiness and more anger.

What happened when scientists asked people to fake a smile?

In the online experiment, about 1,200 adults looked at a series of pictures. Some were pleasant, such as photos of kittens or flowers. Others were upsetting. Participants either posed a smile or reacted naturally. Those asked to smile were warned they could lose $2 of their $6 payment if they didn’t follow instructions. Everyone received the full amount.

Participants rated how happy they felt after each round. A single posed smile gave happiness a small lift. The benefit faded with repetition, even when the pictures were pleasant. By the time participants had posed smile after smile, the task could leave them feeling worse. The study appeared online in October in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Why might a forced smile feel different from one you choose?

Coles sees a difference in who gets to decide. If you smile to lift your own mood, you can stop whenever you like. A worker expected to smile through an unpleasant exchange has less room to make that choice. Researchers call the effort of managing what you show to meet a job’s expectations emotional labor. The smile may look the same to the customer. The effort behind it can feel different to the person wearing it.

Was it the fake smile or the pressure that made people angry?

Norman Farb, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga who was not involved in the study has offered another explanation. He said that holding a facial expression takes attention. Participants may have paid less attention to the pictures which could explain why posing a smile seemed to dull their reactions to pleasant and unpleasant images alike.

Farb also told Newsweek that being monitored and asked to repeat a tedious task with money at stake could become irritating on its own after a while. The experiment captures what happened during a short online session. It doesn’t show what months or years of being told to smile at work do to someone’s well-being.

FAQs

Can a fake smile make you feel happier?

It can briefly. Participants reported a small boost after one posed smile in the experiment.

Why did people feel worse after smiling repeatedly?

The repetition and threat of losing pay may have made the task frustrating. The study doesn’t establish how much each factor contributed.