by Richard
Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone. Trite but true. Seriously. It’s scientifically documented. Well, except for the cry alone part.
It’s been well-documented that watching someone smile will lead to the watchers also smiling. The same goes for watching frowns. What one does when the Joker is standing in front of you, I’m not sure. I mean, that’s one disturbing smile-ish thing. Anyway.
Now, the newest research shows that it’s not just smiling and frowning that will cause us to move our lips. We can also be encouraged to smile or frown when we read about it.
In the first experiment, a group of students read a series of emotion verbs (e.g., “to smile,” “to cry”) and adjectives (e.g., “funny,” “frustrating”) on a monitor, while the activity of their zygomatic major (the muscle responsible for smiles) and corrugator supercilii (which causes frowns) muscles were measured.
The results showed that reading action verbs activated the corresponding muscles. For example, “to laugh” resulted in activation of the zygomatic major muscle, but did not cause any response in the muscles responsible for frowning. Interestingly, when presented with the emotion adjectives like “funny” or “frustrating” the volunteers demonstrated much lower muscle activation compared to their reactions to emotion verbs. The researchers note that muscle activity is “induced in the reader when reading verbs representing facial expressions of emotion.”
Not only that, but these apparently involuntary responses can also effect our judgment.
The results of these experiments reveal that simply reading emotion verbs activates specific facial muscles and can influence judgments we make. The researchers note these findings suggest that “language is not merely symbolic, but also somatic,” and they conclude that “these experiments provide an important bridge between research on the neurobiological basis of language and related behavioral research.”
Now this is news I could use. I think I’m going to start buying stock in post-it notes because I’m going to be using a lot of them. I’m going to post lots of smiling action verbs all over the house. I figure I might have found the silver bullet to slay teenage angst. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tags: Action Verbs, Adjectives, behavior, Bridge, dude, Dude's, Emotion, Expression, Expressions, Facial Expressions, Facial Muscles, Freak, Freaky Friday, Freaky Friday, funny, Involuntary Responses, Joke, Joker, Judgment, Judgments, Laugh, Laughs, Lead, Lips, little dudes, men, Muscle Activation, Muscle Activity, Neurobiological Basis, reading, research, richard, science, Smile, Smiles, Volunteer, Volunteers