Can Smiling Actually Make You Happier? And Why a Clockmaker Figured Out Longitude
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2020
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn whether smiling can actually make you feel happier and why it took John Harrison, a working-class clockmaker, to figure out longitude.
It Took a Working-Class Clockmaker to Figure Out Longitude by Ashley Hamer
- Dr Helen Klus. (2017, October 26). Latitude and Longitude. The Star Garden. http://www.thestargarden.co.uk/Longitude.html
- Longitude found - the story of Harrison’s Clocks. (2015, October 7). Royal Museums Greenwich. https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/longitude-found-john-harrison
- Roberts, A. (2014, May 17). A true sea shanty: the story behind the Longitude prize. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/18/true-sea-shanty-story-behind-longitude-prize-john-harrison
Can smiling really make you happier? By Grant Currin
- O’Grady, C. (2019, September 5). Can Smiling Really Make You Happier? FiveThirtyEight; FiveThirtyEight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-smiling-really-make-you-happier/
- Woodell, A. (2020). Leaning into the replication crisis: Why you should consider conducting replication research. Https://Www.APA.org. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psn/2020/03/replication-crisis
- Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.768
- Wagenmakers, E.-J., Beek, T., Dijkhoff, L., Gronau, Q. F., Acosta, A., Adams, R. B., Albohn, D. N., Allard, E. S., Benning, S. D., Blouin-Hudon, E.-M., Bulnes, L. C., Caldwell, T. L., Calin-Jageman, R. J., Capaldi, C. A., Carfagno, N. S., Chasten, K. T., Cleeremans, A., Connell, L., DeCicco, J. M., … Zwaan, R. A. (2016). Registered Replication Report. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(6), 917–928. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616674458
- Coles, N. A., March, D. S., Marmolejo-Ramos, F., Arinze, N. C., Ndukaihe, I. L. G., Özdoğru, A. A., … Liuzza, M. (2019, February 4). A Multi-Lab Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis by The Many Smiles Collaboration. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cvpuw
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:07.0 | And I'm Natalia Reagan. |
| 0:08.0 | Today you learn whether smiling can actually make you feel happier, |
| 0:12.0 | Anne White took a workingclass clockmaker to figure |
| 0:14.7 | out longitude. Let's satisfy some curiosity. You might have heard that psychology is |
| 0:20.5 | having a bit of a crisis. A lot of the studies that form the basis of what we believe about human behavior have proven very hard or impossible for other researchers to replicate. |
| 0:31.0 | It's casting doubt on what we know about ourselves and our |
| 0:34.8 | brains. A poster child of this phenomenon is the facial feedback hypothesis or the |
| 0:40.6 | idea that the physical act of smiling can actually make you see the world in a happier light. |
| 0:46.0 | Will it survive the replication crisis? |
| 0:48.0 | Science are looking. |
| 0:50.0 | Well, you'll find out. |
| 0:52.0 | Some of the ideas behind the facial feedback hypothesis go all the way back to Darwin, |
| 0:57.0 | but things really started in 1988. |
| 1:00.0 | That was when a social psychologist had participants hold a pen in their mouths and then rate how funny they found various farside cartoons. |
| 1:09.0 | The participants who held the pen horizontally, which put their mouths in a smiling position, consistently rated the |
| 1:15.0 | cartoons as funnier than the participants who held the pen like a drinking straw. |
| 1:19.4 | It was a blockbuster study that caught public attention and became important to the psychology of emotion. |
| 1:25.0 | Then 2015 happened. |
| 1:28.0 | That year, a group led by psychology researcher Brian Noesek, tried to replicate 100 psychology studies and a large portion of them failed. |
| 1:38.0 | That was the match that ignited the now infamous replication crisis. A year later a group of 17 labs tried to replicate the findings from the 1988 facial feedback study. |
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