The Facial Feedback Hypothesis

To what extent does the act of smiling generate happiness in the mind of the smiler? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the Facial Feedback Hypothesis and what it means for our complex human emotions. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And let's give this opening another shot,
because I just tried to really corny opening line and
Robert's just a look of quiet contempt across the table.

(00:25):
I was I was laughing on the inside, you know,
I'm sure you were. I wasn't even laughing at my
own joke there, um, And maybe this will be better. Okay,
So we're gonna start off today by doing a Charles
Darwin deep cut. So Darwin of course published his great
work on the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine,
and of course that was the book that explained his
theory of the origin of species, the revolution by natural selection.

(00:49):
Then later you got another one, that's The Descent of
Man eighteen seventy one, which applied his theory to human evolution.
And then a year after that, in eighteen seventy two,
he published The Oppression of Emotions in Man and Animals,
which is about the biological features of emotions like happiness, sadness, surprise, fear.

(01:10):
For example, The relationship between what we feel and the
physical expressions of those feelings in the body. Because I
think this is one of those little mysteries that's so
close and so invisible, we forget to ask why, But
why is it that emotions which are influenced by the
content of our thoughts, like our beliefs and our knowledge

(01:33):
what we're aware of? They why do they cause these powerful, automatic,
even unconscious reactions from the muscles and glands throughout the body.
Why does a feeling of moral disgust cause us to
involuntarily turn our faces away and crinkle our noses up?
Or why does a feeling of embarrassment or passion sometimes

(01:55):
cause blood to rush to the cheeks and cause us
to cover parts of our faces with our hands ends,
Or why does an emotionally manipulative TV commercial about a
sad dog trigger these unconscious movements in the eyebrows and
the corners of the mouth, or even engage the tear
ducks if you're a real sap, yes, the sad dog.
The dog should be smiling and be happy. Right, Well,

(02:17):
there's always like those are the things that are funny,
where like a really dramatically moving, you know, whole movie
or book might not make me cry, but like the
the sentimental commercial with like the old dog Buddy and
the you know, buying the puri in a one for
him or whatever that really like gets me going finally

(02:37):
sharpened and by um uh, you know, a multimillion dollar
marketing campaigns to cut right to the heart. Now their
emotional assassins, they slip in in the night, their ninja.
So I think these relationships between thoughts and feelings and
autonomically regulated involuntary activity of the skeletal muscles in the

(02:59):
face and elsewhere in the body is truly a fascinating
evolutionary mystery. Why do our bodies execute these movements when
we feel these things? What biological purpose does it serve?
And why does so many of these relationships between feelings
and movements of the skeletal muscle, not all, but a
lot of them. Why do they seem to transcend cultural, national,

(03:22):
and linguistic barriers. So I think this whole area is
a is a totally interesting subject ripe for investigation. But
today we wanted to focus on one specific question that
arises from Darwin's work here, and to introduce this question,
I want to read a passage with a few abridgements
from the very end of the book, where Darwin writes

(03:43):
about some of the implications of his observations about emotions
in humans and animals. Quote. The movements of expression in
the face and body, whatever their origin may have been,
are in themselves of much importance for our welfare. They
serve as the first means of munication between the mother
and her infant. She smiles approval and thus encourages her

(04:05):
child on the right path, or frown's disapproval. We readily
perceive it's right away, But come on, a kid was
just born, just already just complete disapproval. Maybe that's more important. Later,
we readily perceive sympathy in others by their expression. Our
sufferings are thus mitigated and our pleasures increased, and mutual

(04:26):
good feeling is thus strengthened. The movements of expression give
vividness and energy to our spoken word. They reveal the
thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words,
which may be falsified. And then a little bit later,
the free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it.

(04:46):
On the other hand, the repression, as far as this
is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions. He
who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage.
He who does not control the signs of fear will
experience fear and a greater degree. And he who remains
passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of

(05:07):
recovering elasticity of mind. These results followed partly from the
intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and
their outward manifestations, and partly from the direct influence of
exertion on the heart and consequently on the brain. Even
the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in

(05:28):
our minds. Shakespeare, who from his wonderful knowledge of the
human mind ought to be an excellent judge, says, is
it not monstrous that this player here? And this is
a line from Hamlet's soliloquy, where he's watching the play,
and he's watching the actors, and he concludes in the
end that the plays the thing wherein I'll catch the
conscience of the king. But earlier in the soliloquy he's

(05:49):
uh watching the actors act, and and Hamlet thinks, is
it not monstrous that this player here? But in a
fiction in a dream of passion could force his soul
so to his own conceit that from her working all
his visage wand tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
a broken voice, and his whole functions suiting with forms

(06:13):
to his conceit, and all for nothing. You know, this
is interesting getting into acting, because I feel like, maybe
this is just me, but I feel like a lot
of us when we watch a well acted scene, especially
in a film as opposed to a play, where you
can actually get so much closer uh to the facial
features of the actor, if if the actor is is

(06:35):
truly talented, it's something to behold watching them channel emotions,
sometimes completely nonverbally, and I think it probably stands out
for a couple of reasons. For for starters, there are
a lot of bad or just average performances in film
where you don't see authentic emotion uh channeled, even in
like scenes of extreme emotion, which you're going to encounter

(06:58):
more often in a film perhaps than in everyday life.
But even in everyday life, when we are when we're
encountering someone displaying extreme emotion, we are likely a part
of that scenario. You know, unless we're just as we
see something on the street. But even then, I mean,
are we Unless you're a complete bystander and you're just
completely locked out of it, you're probably going to feel something.
That's a really good point. Whereas if you watch, if

(07:20):
you're watching just a really well acted scene in a film,
like you, you have that permission of distance right where
you can stand back and say, look at what their
their faces doing, Like I'm watching blood vessels move, I'm
seeing something in their eyes, like I'm I'm seeing authentic
emotion pour out of their face. Yeah, It's like watching
a film can, especially with great acting, can be like

(07:40):
a tasting course for human emotions, whereas normally, like you know,
you'd be involved in the cooking or something where you
know and so uh and of course it would just
be rude to try to observe other people's emotions. Uh
so yeah, yeah, that's a really good point about acting.
And it is uh interesting, I mean we often wonder

(08:01):
this right, like, um, when an actor convincingly portrays an
emotion or character, does the actor actually feel that emotion?
What are the important biological or psychological differences in the
moment between an actor acting out in emotion with their
face and their body and a person actually feeling that emotion. Like, what,

(08:23):
what are the differences you could name their Yeah, I mean,
obviously they're different approaches to acting, different schools of acting.
But uh, you know, certainly a lot of the time
when you're seeing somebody emote on the screen, they are
they are drawing on real emotions, real experiences that are
in some way comparable to what their character is supposed
to feel. Yeah, And I think that's why a lot
of times actors actually need time to say, get into

(08:45):
and out of character. You know, they can't turn it
off and on in an instant. I mean, I guess
maybe some can, but a lot can't. They need they
need a few moments to sort of gather themselves to
get in and then gather themselves once they get out.
But yeah, So anyway, are one is suggesting here that
the bodily manifestations of emotion, including the facial expressions, are

(09:06):
not just a consequence of the emotions we feel, though
they are that, of course, uh. And the fact that
we have these outward uh signs of the emotions we feel,
of course, is useful for communicating our emotional states to others,
and this could be one very important biological role that
these expressions play. But he says they also are involved

(09:27):
in the regulation and maintenance of the emotions themselves. So
a smile isn't just a consequence of feeling joy. The
smile contributes to and sustains and modulates the feeling of joy.
The tightened lip corner isn't just a result of our
feeling of contempt, but it in some way makes us

(09:49):
feel contempt. So it's almost like there are two dogs
chained to each other, and if one moves the other
one cannot help but be moved as well. Right, well,
I mean according to to Darwin's view here. Yeah, so
his idea that the bodily expressions don't just follow from
emotional states. They they in part are the emotional states.
They contribute to and control the emotional states. Yeah yeah,

(10:12):
and uh, you know, we'll get into this some more.
But I think that this is something that a lot
of us can can point to times in our life
where this either definitely feels true or other times where
it definitely doesn't feel true. Like um, for instance, I
go to I go to yoga a lot I really
enjoy and I think benefit physically and mentally from a

(10:34):
yoga practice. And there are times where you're you're in
a pose and a teacher may tell everybody, don't you know,
don't forget to smile, smile, and then that'll change your
sort of emotional uh participation with the pose, And in
those situations it it does feel sometimes like it helps.
On the other hand, I've had teachers who say that

(10:55):
they they've stopped saying that because sometimes people in the class,
you know, have bad experience. It's with being told to smile.
I mean, that's become very much a betting, harassed on
the streets, a cliche of misogynistic behavior, telling someone they
should smile more telling someone they should smile, And it
can be that alone. Yeah, I can feel no matter
you know, you know, you know what what your your

(11:16):
your gender happens to be, it's like being told to smile,
as if that is just going to fix your problems,
that's gonna totally change your your your mood. It can
feel insulting, right like, surely my emotional state depends on
more than just what my face is doing. And ultimately
I think we all can agree it does. Being told
to smile and then smiling does not fix whatever caused

(11:38):
you to frown to begin with. And then that's not
getting into the case, you know, the situation that we
do need to frown, We do need to have like
the full spectrum of emotions. Right, that's certainly right, even
if Darwin is correct, Like even if Darwin is right
that the smile itself can give you some kind of
feedback that in turn actually increases the positivity of your
emotional state the smile and make you happier. I mean

(12:01):
that that doesn't necessarily mean it's good for other, like
exogenous forces to try to coerce smiling on you, to
tell you you should be smiling, which I think can
probably lead to all kinds of other emotions that could
negate whatever positivity comes from the muscle movements that might
be making you happier. So, as we're talking, you know,
we're not talking just about smiles, but smiles do come

(12:23):
up a lot in in the discussion here, so I
thought it would be helpful to take a moment just
talk about what a smile is. Um. You know, our
smile is a bit different from you know, the smile
that we see expressed by our great ape brethren. Where
it is essentially a fear grin. Uh. You know, it's
it's often flashed when an individual is trapped or threatened,

(12:44):
it to show of submission to more dominant members of
the group. And you know it's it is then an
admission of fear and a signal, uh though a signal
that doesn't just stand on its own. It's like part
of a larger bodily signal that is expressed, uh, just
if to say, you know, I am not hostile, I
am not a threat. And I was reading a little

(13:04):
bit about this. Neuroscientist um Michael Graziano, who have discussed
on the show before. He has a wonderful Eon magazine
article that discusses this topic and he points out a
number of things we've talked about here already. Also points out,
you know that that even you know, with humans, people
sometimes in subservient positions will will smile a lot. You know,
there's sort of the uh, you know, the the boot

(13:28):
licking smile that we still kind of identify the idea
of the obsequious smile. Yeah, and uh, and so that
in that it would seem that there are certain aspects
of the great ape smile, but haven't quite left us. Uh,
you know. He points as well to shakespeare line from
troy Less and Cressida quote they send their smiles before
them to Achilles, which which I think is is rather nice.

(13:51):
So the human smile seems to have definitely emerged out
of the same sort of thing. I mean, you know,
we are we are primates after all. And of course
even though they're you know, a smile as a smile
as a mile, there are some cultural differences in the
way smiles are perceived from one culture to another. Um.
We mentioned, uh, Darwin mentioned babies earlier, and and certainly

(14:11):
human newborns flash reflex smiles, but then social smiles come
a little later, six to twelve weeks generally. Um. Yeah. Anyway,
In this an article, Graziano points out that, you know,
most commentators agree that primate smiles are very old, and
some think that it might have evolved out of an
old or threatening display. But he thinks that if we
focus too much on the teeth, we miss something else. Again,

(14:34):
that full body display that is evident, right, It involves
multiple regions of muscles in the face. Yeah, I think
stuff around the cheeks and the sides of the mouth,
but also the eyes right, yeah, yeah, and even yeah,
just like what you know, the full body is doing
in the full uh you know, communication array, that is
the face in the head. So what do he proposes
ultimately is that we're talking We're talking about here is

(14:56):
a smile. That's kind of a halfway point between not
re acting to a display of dominance and fully reacting
to it. Um, which which is which is interesting? It's
almost like, uh, you know, these these creatures learning to
lie to each other, to deceive each other, you know. Um,
here's a quote from where he's talking about like monkey
A and monkey be, you know, hypothetically interacting. Quote. Monkey

(15:20):
BE can learn a lot by watching the reaction of
Monkey A. If Monkey A makes a full blown protective response,
cringe and all, it's a pretty good sign that Monkey
A is frightened. He's uneasy, his personal space is revved
up and expanded. He must view monkey B as a
threat a social superior. On the other hand, if Monkey
A reveals only a subtle response, perhaps squinting and slightly

(15:42):
pulling back his head, it's a good sign that Monkey
A is not so frightened. He does not consider monkey
B to be a social superior or a threat, So
the social signal evolves from here and he drives home
the quote. The primary evolutionary pressure is on the receiver
of the signal, not the cinder. The story is about
how we came to react to smiles. Yeah, that's interesting,

(16:03):
but it also raises all these other questions about So
if we consider the evolution of the smile as having
something to do with social signaling, and you know, relates
to the social relationships between animals that live in groups
and interact with each other, why is it that in
in our lives at least, I would say the smile
is very divorced from that original context where you smile

(16:24):
by yourself all the time, you be completely alone and
something makes you happy and you find yourself beaming. Yeah,
this is true. Um. Now, we've discussed before though, how
we might not laugh, though we might smile but not laugh,
or at least that's a good point. The laughter might
be in the smile might be more pronounced if there's
someone else around, particularly you know, someone we know. Yeah,

(16:45):
we were just talking about this before we started recording. Actually,
how you know we we watched the Mystery Science Theater
three thousand episode and we laugh if somebody else is
in the room. It's still funny if nobody else is there,
but you just don't laugh out loud. Yeah, I've I'm
trying to think of a time if I if I
ever watched something and just really laughed out loud by myself,

(17:09):
and how funny it is, Like, uh yeah, nothing comes
to mind, And in fact, I think I would feel
weird if I did. I would feel like Sam Neil's
character at the end of In the Mouth of Madness
where he's in the movie theater. Sometimes Barbarian movies do
it for me. I think I was laughing pretty loud
by myself when I was watching Your Hunter from the Future.

(17:29):
Maybe you were just beside yourself with laughter. And therefore
you know you have you know yourself to to communicate
to um. So so basically, Graziana points out, you know
that from here it would have been an evolutionary arms race. Um.
And and this is a wonderful article, by the way,
it's titled The First Smile. Um. It's available you know,
Eddie and magazine. And uh, he gets into laughter as well.

(17:52):
But here's how he sums everything up. Quote. Evolution favors
animals that can read and react to those signs, and
it favors animals that can manipulate those signs to influence
whoever is watching. We have stumbled on the defining ambiguity
of human emotional life. We are always quite caught between
authenticity and fake ery, always floating in the gray area
between involuntary outburst and expedient pretense. Yeah, so, you know,

(18:18):
I think it's helpful to think about the complexity of
the smile, the mix of authenticity and fakeery. Um. You know,
we've just I think we've discussed fake smiles on the
show before about how you know, there's this lack of
micro expressive detail and a fake smile that you can
pick up on. Um, but that to like truly fake
a smile, you do have to summon some of the

(18:39):
energy of the smile, you know. Um. Yeah, anyway, it
gets it gets very complicated, and especially in the human scenario,
to to define exactly what a smile is in the
degrees of smiling. Well, here's maybe a good question. Are
all smiles on command fake smiles? Or are there are
there cases where you smile on command and not be

(19:00):
because you know, you suddenly are overwhelmed by a feeling
of positivity and joy and happiness. You know, you just
smile because you need to. But it's not fake. Yeah,
this is a good question. It's it's it kind of
goes in with laughter as well, or at least kind
of like the mild laughter. I think of like interactions
with people, uh, you know, be be it at work
or you know, strangers at a store. You know, the

(19:20):
various social interactions that feel our lives. And I'll catch
myself smiling, I'll catch myself, you know, laughing a little bit,
even if there's not a joke, which seems strange, like
maybe I'm it makes me kind of feel like I'm
the joker or something. Um, the man who laughs. Yeah,
not in a good way, not in the Steve Miller way,
but you know in the Batman way. Um and yeah,

(19:40):
And you start teasing it apart, and you start asking yourself, well,
was this authentic? Was this inauthentic? Or was it or
is it like Graziano says, is somewhere in between. Like
for for instance, um, I think one person wrote into
us once and accused one or both of us a
fake laughing at each other's jokes. Do you remember this?
I don't remember this. And uh, um, yeah, it was

(20:00):
a while back, and I think only it was only
one person that ever ever wrote in about it, and
it just made me stop and think though, because I'm like, well,
what we do here is is kind of a performance.
You know, we're not reading from a script. We're having
an authentic conversation, but it's a conversation knowing that someone
else is listening to it, and like we we do

(20:22):
make each other laugh, but maybe we do lean into
it a little bit. I don't know it Like it
basically comes down to exactly what Graziana said that it's
it's not just fakery and authenticity, but there's this there's
this huge area in between, and we may not even
be aware of where we are on that spectrum in
a given moment. Okay, I think we gotta take a break,
but we will be right back with more than all right,

(20:46):
We're back. Okay. So we've been discussing facial expressions emotions. Uh,
Darwin's writing on the relationship between facial expressions and emotions,
or not just facial expressions, I mean all kinds of
body expressions and physical manifest stations and emotions. Um. And
so this leads up to something that we're gonna be
talking about for the rest of today's episode, which has

(21:07):
come to be known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Now,
I guess to have a starting place, we should talk
about what some of the acceptable emotions for discussions are,
because obviously there are lots of complex emotions that might
be you know, little shadings of other more basic emotions
or combinations of feelings commonly acknowledged basic emotions in psychology,

(21:31):
as categorized by the American psychologist Paul Ekman. Let's hear him,
how about happiness, sadness, surprise, discussed, anger, and fear. There
you got your big six. Now, other psychologists have offered
slightly different lists, but I think this seems to be
like a good starting place. These are like six widely

(21:53):
acknowledged basic emotions, setting aside for a second that, you know,
different theories of what emotions actually are, which will come
back to later in the episode. They're they're also like
the constructionist ideas of emotions, which says, it's more like
there's some kind of universal slider underneath all these and
these are like categories that we apply to where that

(22:14):
slider is. But for now, we're gonna work with those
kind of six emotions, and so put succinctly, the facial
feedback hypothesis is the idea that quote an individual's experience
of emotion is influenced by feedback from their facial movements. Now,
there are tons of different versions of this hypothesis that
have been articulated and tested over the years. We'll we'll

(22:36):
get more into those differences later on. We know Darwin
proposed something like this in the eighteen seventies, and it's
been advocated by other important figures in intellectual history. The
Seminal American psychologist William James argued in his eighteen ninety
work on on psychology that at least for the more
basic or coarser emotions, emotions in a way simply are

(22:59):
identical with the sensation of their physical manifestations in the body. Quote.
If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to
abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of
its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind,
no mind stuff out of which the emotion can be constituted,

(23:22):
and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception
is all that remains. So that this is a strange idea,
but this did hold some sway for a long time.
It's the idea that the feeling of an emotion is
the feeling of changes happening in the body, including but
not limited to the skeletal muscle. And this would center largely,

(23:44):
but not entirely, on expressions that happen automatically in the
facial muscles, but also all throughout the body. Well, you know,
this does remind me that you know, when when one
is smiling intensely um organically, you know you're not faking
it at all, but like something is making you really
smile and perhaps laugh really hard as well, there is

(24:05):
a feeling of possession about it where you could imagine
it's like this the physical um you know, symptoms are
actually kind of like crunching your brain into this, uh,
this pattern of thinking, like like you are you are happy? Now?
You are laughing? Now? Do you ever get the feeling
like feeling happiness in the face in the way that

(24:28):
if the emotion has a location, it kind of feels
like it's somewhere behind the face and kind of or
like it's a claw, Like it's like a like a
claw clamped over the face. Like a xenomorphic claw, uh,
you know, an alien And and then you get to
the point where your face is hurting a little bit
Like that is always a weird sensation where you're like,

(24:49):
I'm I'm so happy and overcome by joy and it's
physically hurting me. I wish it would stop. Well. On
the other hand, I mean other emotions. I think we
often do you not, least I do associate fear with
a feeling in the stomach and the gut. Do you
not associate sadness with kind of feelings in like the

(25:10):
throat and the temples and behind the face? Also? Yeah, yeah,
I mean with with with that being, you know, it's
it's often like there's a like a nasal activation. You know,
we often don't want to think about that when we
we think about, you know, weeping tears of joy, but
it's often not just tears of joy. It's not of
joy or a snot of sadness. But it's not nearly
as poetic. But uh, but that's how it works. Uh.

(25:33):
And in terms of like fear and you know, anxiety,
I often think of it as more like a like
a claw. Again, I guess it's claws, Like I can't
get passive clause. But it's more it is more of
an internal claw clutching not the face but the heart.
I had no idea your psychic universe was all clause. Yeah,
I mean that's I guess that's how I viewed the
outside world. It's just a series of clause trying to

(25:55):
um get to the heart of me. So William James also,
like Darwin, addressed the subject of acting. So to to
defend this idea, he brings up a hypothetical objection to
his argument that goes something like this is so okay, So,
William James, you say that bodily expressions of an of

(26:16):
an emotion are identical to the feeling of the emotion.
Wouldn't it follow then that an actor faking in emotion
is exactly the same as somebody really feeling it. And uh.
And the way James phrases this is that any voluntary,
cold blooded arousal of the so called manifestations of a
special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself. And

(26:39):
James answers this objection by saying, first of all, you
can't really test this because a lot of the bodily
manifestations of emotions are in organs that we can't voluntarily
control things in the you know, in the gut and
the autonomic nervous system. He gives the example of tears.
Most people can't cry on command, thus they can't actually
perform a voluntary, cold blooded arousal of the physical manifestations

(27:03):
in the body. But and there are some cases where
we can control those manifestations. And in these cases, James says,
the problem with the objection is that it just assumes
it's obviously wrong that cold blooded arousal of the manifestations
gives us the emotion itself. He does not concede that
this is an absurdity. Instead, he writes, quote, everyone knows

(27:24):
how panic is increased by flight, and how giving way
to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves.
Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute and
calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose
only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of
the machinery enrage. It is notorious how we work ourselves

(27:47):
up to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse
to express a passion, and it dies. This is a
famous quote here, uh count ten before venting your anger,
and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage
is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand,
sit all day in a moping posture, sigh and reply

(28:10):
to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers.
There's no more valuable precept in moral education than this,
as all who have experience no. If we wish to
conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously and
in the first instance, cold bloodedly go through the outward
movements of these contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate.

(28:34):
So this is sort of the origin of fake it
till you make it right yeah, or um yeah, or
telling people to smile and they'll be happy. I mean,
it's uh yeah, this this, I mean, he puts it
so well, and my my response is both yes and no,
like you know this, this feels absolutely true, but also

(28:54):
like you know, so many different objections pop up as well.
I mean, for starters, the idea of like refused to
express a passion and it dies. I mean that runs
counter to a lot of at least you know, so
certainly to the advice that is often given about passions
and how we should not bury them inside of us,
because it won't die if it is buried inside. It's

(29:15):
that it will find a way out, and it might
not find its way out in in a in a
way or at least at a time. That is uh,
that that that that is beneficial. Well, I I am
also of two minds about this, um and the idea
of yeah, refused to express express a passion and it dies. Um.
I think I've talked on the podcast before about how
I'm often skeptical of the benefits of what people call venting,

(29:40):
though at the same time, I don't think it's good to,
you know, have strong feelings about something and have nobody
to talk to them about, you know, and when you
can't talk about something that is psychologically stressful, it's a
burden on you. And so like, on one hand, you
do need to be able to talk about things, but
there's this thing people call venting, which is like something
is bothering them and they just like continually express their

(30:04):
frustration and a kind of repetitive pattern about it. I
tend to notice throughout my life that this in myself
and in others. This doesn't actually make you feel better
that the venting process, I think most of the time
just makes you matter and matter. You work yourself up
into a state where the problem assumes a larger posture
than it did to begin with. And you're talking about,

(30:26):
like speaking aloud, that's sort of venting, because it seems
like that sort of a venting has a very has
a lot in common with the things that go on
inside the mind and the default mode network as we
ruminate over something some worry we we we kind of
rehearse for disasters, for example, or we um we essentially

(30:47):
fantasize about terrible things occurring and um, you know it's
it's it's kind of the same practice, right, I mean,
it's uh, you know, it's it's filling your mind with
um some sort of negati of outcome be be it.
You know, you're yelling at somebody or um, you know,
we're bad things happening to you, kind of rehearsals for disaster. Yeah,

(31:08):
the psychological process of rumination where you where you just
like rehearse the worst possible scenarios in your mind over
and over again is terrible. But then the idea here though,
is there could be like a feedback loop if you're
actually if if you're expressing it bodily and facially, then
it's just gonna potentially make things worse. Yeah, um and
I do think to some extent that's true. So, yeah,

(31:29):
obviously we're dealing with something that's very complicated, and that's
not a surprise because it involves emotions. I think emotions
are I mean, we'll go ahead and say today, emotions
are one of the most difficult things to study scientifically,
I think, um and and so studies about them are
often plagued with problems of inconsistency and how the emotions
are characterized, how they're measured, How exactly do you quantify

(31:53):
emotional states. It's one of the most difficult problems in
all of science. I think, Yeah, how do you even
agree on the base terminology? And then if you end
up creating something that seems like a useful explanation, is
it ultimately just kind of a you know, a system
of metaphors to try and make sense of this thing.
You know, it's kind of like the movie, the Pixar
movie inside Out. Oh, I hadn't seen it. A wonderful

(32:13):
movie about about emotions, uh, you know, but ultimately like
there are not you know, a series of individuals inside
of your head arguing with each other and going on adventures. Uh.
So you know, you you worry too about like to
what extent you end up like going too far in
one of these directions and in really trying to uh
you know, apply language to the the the un language

(32:35):
complexity of the mind. But obviously, then again, emotions are
one of the most important features of our entire lives,
and so psychology should be taking a crack and understanding them.
And so I guess that brings us back to the
back to this question of the facial feedback hypothesis. If
it's true that movements of the facial muscles or facial

(32:56):
expressions do contribute to our underlie ing emotional states, they
don't just follow from them, but they feed back into
them and in some way control them. Is there evidence
for that? Is there evidence that that's true? And I
guess that's what we should discuss next. So one thing
we absolutely do not lack for is studies on this subject.

(33:17):
The facial feedback hypothesis is huge, and it's a very
complicated subject with a massive and conflicting research history. There's
no way to discuss all these studies, but in a
minute we will be looking at a recent meta analysis
paper that sort of gives an overview of these findings. Now,
one thing is like problems with methodology we were just

(33:37):
alluding to and how you study things like the relationship
between facial expressions and emotions. Of course, you can just
ask people to smile or frown or do things with
their face and then ask them how they feel. But
these kinds of experiments would have some obvious limitations, right,
like if people are aware of being asked to smile,

(33:57):
uh this knowledge could change how they were poor their feelings,
and it could bias the results. You could have acquiescence bias,
where you know, people in an experiment tend to just
sort of try to figure out what the experimenters want
and give them those types of results, or more generally,
what are referred to uh as demand characteristics where but

(34:19):
where things emerge in the research environment that would not
emerge naturally. So different tests devised over the years have
tried to get around this a number of ways, trying
to like contort the facial muscles and see if that
does something to emotional states without just saying, hey, you know,
could you please frown for a minute, and then we're
gonna ask you to do a questionnaire. So, like, one

(34:41):
type of thing is the pin in the mouth study.
So here's one where you put a pin either between
your lips or you put a pin between your teeth.
When you put a pin between your lips, it just
happens to form your face into a frown. When you
put a pin between your teeth, it happens to induce
the same muscles that you would use in a smile.
So that's been used in a number of studies. Another

(35:02):
thing is like asking participants to say a lot of
certain vowels. For example, awe sounds incidentally produced smile posture
and oh sounds incidentally produced frown posture. And some research
has found, for example, that awe sounds people make people
self report more happy or pleasant feelings. And I've even

(35:23):
seen this connected to the prevalence of awe sounds and
religious chance. I thought that's kind of an interesting idea there,
like halla, hallelujah, all kinds of I mean that awe
sounds are more prevalent around the world and religious chants
than ow sounds, and this could be because they induce
more pleasant mental states. Now where does own fall? Then

(35:46):
hopefully ow would be between the two? Right maybe? But
out of this this huge history of of all these
different studies, uh, just this year we got this big
meta analysis pulled together tabulating a hundred thirty eight different
studies on the effect. It was by Nicholas A. Coles,
Jeff T. Larson, and Heather C. Lynch, published in Psychological

(36:07):
Bulletin in twenty nineteen. And so, okay, you might think
that given that many studies, a hundred and thirty eight studies,
now we should have a really solid body of evidence
converging on a clear consensus answer. Uh. And in one
broad sense that's true, and in many more specific senses
it's not true to quote the authors here. Unfortunately, more

(36:27):
than a centuries worth of research has not yet clarified
whether facial feedback effects are reliable. For example, researchers have
produced a variety of theoretical disagreements about win facial feedback
effects should emerge, but it remains unclear which, if any
of these theories are correct. Furthermore, seventeen labs recently found
that even the most seminal demonstration of facial feedback effects

(36:49):
is not clearly replicable. Uh so, and this was a
big problem. So like one of the biggest studies it was.
It was a pin in the mouth study that found that,
you know, putting a pin between the t made people
report more happy emotions than putting it between the lips.
Uh that that was big. But then just recently a
bunch of abs tried to replicate it and they couldn't.

(37:10):
So here here's this big question what all these studies
add up to. So here's where this new meta analysis
comes in. Quote amid this uncertainty, we provide a narrative
review of research on the facial feedback hypothesis and a
meta analysis of all available experimental evidence. So they're pulling
all the studies together and trying to see if they
can crunch the numbers and figure out what is shown overall.

(37:32):
So I think maybe we should take another break and
then when we come back we can get into the
results of this study. Thank alright, we're back. So yeah,
we're looking at a meta analysis of all of these,
uh these different studies about facial feedback hypothesis, and uh
hopefully like some sense will emerge from it, all, right,

(37:53):
they we'll have some some some some general um you know,
ideas that we can draw from it. Right, we will
get some. We there are other things that are left unanswered.
So one of the things is that we we alluded
to all these different problems. And how you study something
like the facial feedback hypothesis, uh like, The authors identify
four major theoretical disagreements in how people even approach the subject.

(38:16):
To begin with, I'll try to simplify them as briefly
as I can. One is modulation versus initiation. Okay, So
one one view says that emotions are maintained and modulated
by body expressions. So you're genuinely happy, You're feeling happy,
and that makes you smile, and then the smile can
maintain and intensify the happiness, or suppressing the smile can

(38:39):
put a damper on the happiness. This is the modulation hypothesis. Meanwhile,
the other view would say that at least some emotions
can be created out of nothing with facial feedback alone.
So maybe you're feeling neutral, but you make yourself frowned
for five minutes and you actually end up feeling sad.
This is the initiation hypothesis, So the author is no

(39:00):
something interesting here that maybe we wouldn't have thought about otherwise. Uh.
They know that this distinction assumes that emotional experiences have
a beginning and an ending, that they are discreet rather
than continuous and always in flux. Like if you feel happy,
can you pinpoint the moment when you started feeling happy?

(39:20):
And was there no happiness before? Or was it just
something that got turned up in amplitude? But was there before? Uh?
This is an interesting question, like our emotions discrete things
that can begin an end, or they part of a
continuous media that's always in flux with maybe Uh, And
of course if they are, there's maybe no difference between

(39:40):
initiation and modulation. Yeah, it makes me think it's like
it's like a flow state and non emotional state. I've
never heard it put like that. ID have to think
about that because generally when I think about being in
a flow state, I think about it being happiness, because
like it's you're content, you're not you know, you're totally
wrapped up in the task at hand, and you're not uh,

(40:01):
you know, thinking about anything else. But then again, is
it is it really happiness or is it like just
sort of removal from the uh you know, the wheel
of emotions to some extent, disengaging from the default mode network,
that's for sure. Uh yeah, and the default mode network
sometimes just seems like kind of a roulette wheel of
emotions that it's just spin it and let's just see
what what the what the universe has for me right now?

(40:23):
Am I gonna be happy in the next minute? Or sad?
It's like you or I have and feel like I
just I have no idea, And for me it's like
which of your failures would you like to contemplate? Yeah? Default? Okay,
So next you've got discreet versus dimensional emotional experience. So
our happiness, anger, sadness all that. Are they discrete categories?

(40:46):
Do these basic emotions exist as sort of separate programs
within the brain or can they all be reduced to
some underlying phenomena presenting at different levels of intensity and valence.
So the basic idea here is like, imagine you've got
a couple of sliders in your brain. One is a
slider that's the valence is this positive or negative? And

(41:08):
then the other slider is the level of arousal. Are
you high? High? Arousal or low arousal, and those two sliders,
positioned at different places, actually give you the things you
think of as your normal emotions. The names of the
emotions are just sort of like categories that we apply
based on contextual clues. That's a possibility. Yeah, I was

(41:28):
thinking a little about this yesterday because I was working
on another episode's notes and I was listening to a
little Jackson Brown was planned um Fountain of Sorrow, and
I had to stop. It's like, because I was thinking,
is this is this song making me feel good or bad?
Is it making me happy or sad? It's like, it's
but it's neither, you know, it's it's this mix of both.

(41:49):
Like it's a kind of a sad, bittersweet song that's
beautifully recorded and I have, you know, nostalgia for it,
but it's also you know, it's complicated. Yeah, there are
a lot of moments where you can start to wonder
if this is I think sometimes called like the constructionist
or core affect idea of emotions, where they're not these
discrete programs running in the brain, but they they're the

(42:12):
same thing. They're the same part of the same continuous
quantity and we just like apply categories to different zones
on this graph. Basically, uh, and and depending on what
the contextual clues are, because one level of high arousal
and negative emotion in one state might feel like, you know,
like anger and agitation, and in another state it might

(42:33):
be more like sadness, intense sadness. But obviously, you know,
I don't know which of these theories of emotion is
the correct one. But that's another thing that's at play
in all these studies. People are working off different theories
of emotion when they're trying to study whether emotions can
be modulated or caused by facial movements. Next big question

(42:54):
is awareness involved. If facial feedback does influence our emotions,
do you have to be consciously aware of the face
you're making or how you're moving your muscles, Like I
feel myself smiling. I know that smiles mean happiness, so
I feel happy? Or do these facial movements if the
facial feedback hypothesis is correct, do these facial movements influence

(43:16):
our emotions unconsciously through uh, you know, through feedback mechanisms
that happen outside of our awareness. Huh, Well, my experience
for whatever that's worth. I find that being aware of
your happiness is once you're fire away to potentially bring
it down. You know, that's a good point. Like so,
but but then again, I don't know how that but
that actually relates to naither research here. Well, it's it's

(43:39):
it's hard to think yourself happy, but it's pretty easy
to think yourself sad. Now, one thing we mentioned earlier
is like some of those studies are are aimed at
trying to show that the the effect happens without conscious awareness,
Like the pin in the mouth study. Right, if you
put a pin between people's teeth and that makes them
feel happier, I'll be they're not going to be aware

(44:01):
of the fact that they're smiling. They've just got a
pin in their teeth. Uh, So that for what? And
there were studies that showed something like that, I think
back in the nineteen eighties. However, that was the study
that failed replication in recent years, so people tried to
do the experiment again didn't get the same result. That
means that either there was something wrong with the initial
experiment or with all the replication attempts, or they could

(44:23):
both be sound but arriving at different results. Because there's
some important difference that's not being controlled for their So
that that's something I don't know the answer to yet.
I think I saw there might be a study that
was trying to resolve whatever difference was going on there,
but but I I didn't have time to look into that.
One more big question. Does facial feedback have an effect

(44:43):
on affective judgments? So not just how you feel, but
what you think about other things? You know, third parties.
What what do you think about this cup? What do
you think about this microphone? I'm sorry that a cup
is so often an example that we invoke on in
the moment here and it's a it's either going to
be that or the foam soundproofing board. So so, but

(45:04):
what do you think about these things? So, if our
facial expressions modulate our emotions, do they do just that
or do they also change the ways that we make
judgments about these external objects, people and and situations. And
the authors called this the affective judgments hypothesis. Uh, disfrowning
make you view another person more negatively. So obviously, all

(45:26):
these theoretical disagreements make a meta analysis of the facial
feedback hypothesis really difficult, because despite how many studies there are. Now,
they're not all testing exactly the same thing, they're not
all working from the same theoretical framework. So the authors
had to like code for all these differences in what's
being tested in each study, as well as lots of
other moderators, including how the facial feedback was manipulated for example,

(45:50):
you know, the pin and the teeth, or just asking
people to do a facial pose, or even experimenting with
people who have had botoxic injections that restrict facial movement.
That's an interesting on yeah, uh. And then other moderators
like the timing of measurement, uh, the gender for example,
some earlier research had found that maybe men were more
susceptible to body feedback on average than women. Uh, and

(46:12):
weather subjects were aware of being video recorded and things
like that. Alright, so time for the results. Uh. The
I would say, the top line here is that some
facial feedback effects seem to be real, but the effect
is not huge. The overall body of research suggests that
the effect is real, it is significant, but it's relatively small,

(46:35):
and it's variable based on a lot of different things,
like on these theoretical disagreements and moderating variables that we
mentioned earlier, So just a few key selections from the
specifics of the results. UH One is this question about
initiation versus modulation, Right, can facial feedback only influence pre

(46:55):
existing emotions or can it actually create new emotional experiences
from a starting neutral state, And the evidence shows it
can definitely do both. In fact, contrary to many historical
predictions and assumptions, the initiation of emotions through facial posing
is pretty well supported by evidence and seems to be
pretty easy to demonstrate. So it's not just the modulation

(47:17):
of what you're already feeling. You. They've shown a bunch
of times now that you can just take people, make
them do a facial pose and it does sort of
generate an emotion from out of nowhere. However, there is
more evidence for some emotions than others, like that there
is evidence of a small facial feedback effect for most emotions,
but not for a couple of key ones, surprise and fear.

(47:40):
So people who make a happy face, the evidence shows,
on average, will tend to feel more happy. But if
you make a surprised face or a fearful face, there
is not yet good evidence that you will feel those
two emotions, though the authors caution this conclusion because they
say there aren't a whole lot of studies on the
feedback effect for fear and surprise is somehow I can

(48:02):
really see how this would be the case for surprise.
I don't know how you could simulate surprise just by
putting a surprise face on the Surprise seems so much
more really dependent on actual facts of your surroundings. Yeah,
I wonder if if part of this might be that
they're just you know, if we go back to you
know what I'm talking about with Graziano and his um um,

(48:22):
you know, monkey A and Monkey B scenario. Um, Like,
is there ever a necessity to to fake surprise? I mean,
certainly if there's a surprise birthday party and you knew
about it and you're like, oh yeah, or your people
suck at that, right, Yeah, I mean we we do,
Like when you I think most of us, if we
were asked to fake surprise, we would we would have

(48:42):
a hard time doing anything convincing, you know, like it's
generally the kind of thing where again it's a it's
a surprise party that you knew about, or you're humoring
like a child's um uh, you know, game of of
scaring you or something, whereas faking um you know, these
other emotions would have much more advantage and are much

(49:02):
more a part of the human emotional deception tool chest. Yeah,
I think that's right, though, I just do want to
reiterate again their their caution that this may just be
because there are fewer studies on on these emotions, and
we don't know that in a really strong way. But
the evidence for those two emotions is not as strong
as it is for all the others, right, Like, I
don't know that I've ever been though accused of faking fear,

(49:25):
you know, like no one said, No one's ever written
into the show and said you, I don't think you
were really afraid when you were talking about this particular
frightening concept. I think you were faking your fear. I've
never thought about this before. But what emotion is most
often acted badly in movies? What emotion are people the
worst at trying to portray in a fictional scenario? Oh man,

(49:47):
I've seen them. I've seen them all done poorly, and
it contain spectacular in any case. I mean, with fear
and surprise, you know, we can certainly think to really affect,
like when it's done well through whatever acting method is employed,
like it really sticks in your mind. It's a reason
that we how many of us right now are thinking

(50:07):
of Donald Sutherland from the the an Invasion of the
Body Snatchers film. You know, it's such an iconic cinematic
uh you know, moment of just absolute um fear, right,
But a lot of directors actually go out of their
way to create real surprises on sets for the actors
when they want to get a truly shocked and surprised response.
Like I'm thinking of the scene and Alien where the

(50:29):
thing bursts out of John Hurt's chest. Uh. You know
the first time the actors didn't know exactly what was
going to happen in that scene. I think they thought
something was going to happen, but they didn't have all
the details. I think an important thing that Ridley Scott
was going for there was trying to make sure that
they got a real look of shock on their faces.
May because even though they were all great actors, he

(50:50):
didn't trust them enough with surprise. Yeah, there are there
are a number of different filmmaking stories about that right
where where you end up having this rift between the
actors and the director because the director assumes that they
need to tell some sort of stunt to get that
kind of emotion out of them. Um. Was it the
Exorcist where they were allegations or stories about him like

(51:11):
firing Uh, like a firearm being discharged on the set
to make all the actors beyond edge. Yeah, there are
a lot of bad stories about the production of The Exorcist. Okay, okay,
we got to go back to this. So. Um a
couple more things in their results. Is awareness necessary? Do
you have to be aware that you're expressing an emotion
on your face for the expression to influence your feelings?

(51:33):
The results did not demonstrate that you have to be aware,
but they also don't disconfirm there might be some role
for self perception in some cases. Uh. Do facial movements
influence affective judgments, you know, judging other things? The authors
found this question, unlike the general question of facial feedback,
suffered from publication bias, uh and so. And that's of course,

(51:56):
when studies confirming and effect are more likely to be
published than the same studies if they had disconfirmed the effect.
Uh and so. When that bias was corrected for the
results did not yet indicate strong evidence for facial expressions
changing affect of judgment. However, the author's caution against abandoning
this line of inquiry because this one could be highly

(52:19):
context dependent. They point out that there's some other research
in psychology that suggests emotions only change our judgments about
external stimuli in some contexts, maybe like when emotion seems
relevant to the thing you're judging. More research is needed
here to invoke a cliche. But then then they also

(52:39):
talk about how their findings interact with some competing psychological
theories on the nature of emotion, like we talked about earlier. Um,
you know that this question of our emotions like happiness
and anger and fear discrete programs within the brain or
are they contextual categorizations of different variations of intensity and valance?
With this more basic core affect and the results of

(53:02):
the meta analysis show that facial feedback can influence not
only reports of basic emotions, but dimensional reports that would
be in line with the theory of emotions more based
on core affect. So facial feedback doesn't really solve this question.
As best I can tell, it could be consistent with
either way of looking at what emotions are uh. They
also found that results even within the same categories were

(53:24):
fairly variable, suggesting that there were influences on these effects
that are not recorded in the data and that they
weren't able to test. And one example they give of
what this might be is perhaps facial feedback effects are
stronger in populations that are on average more quote attentive
to their bodily cues, including but not limited to appropriate

(53:46):
receptive cue is from the face. And of course appropriate
reception is our sensation. It is when we have more
than five senses, right, It's one of the body senses
that lets us know where the parts of our body are.
It's how you can know where your hands are even
when your eyes are closed. Um. And so it's this
part of this approprio sceptive sense uh and and this

(54:06):
could be an influencing factor. But the studies, of course
haven't tried to record or measure this. And I take
this to mean that people who have stronger senses of
inter reception in general, the sensations within their own bodies,
those people might be more sensitive to feelings created by
the movements of the muscles in their face. And they
also cite maybe different exclusion criteria on different studies could

(54:30):
have influenced why some of the results are so variable.
But they say in the end that quote, the cumulative
evidence to date suggests that facial feedback does indeed influence
emotional experience, given all the caveats we just talked about.
So I think that's interesting. So, like, what are some
takeaways from this Number One? We don't know yet when

(54:50):
and why the effects will be largest, and in general,
the effects are real but kind of small. Though you
could see how this knowledge could be applied to some
kind of therapeutic uses. I think we probably don't know
enough about it to to use it most effectively that
way yet. But say, if you are trying to test
and see, you know, could I make myself feel better
by just making my face smile. It's it's at least

(55:13):
one of those things where I think the risks and
downsides associated with trying that out are probably extremely low, right,
I mean, especially if you're not like to come back
to the yoga example, like if one does experiment with
smiling during certain poses, like you're not you're also doing
all the yoga, you're doing the you know, there's also
the experience of say, you know, working with the teacher,

(55:34):
of being in the space. They're all these other factors
that are contributing, and you're not going to make or
break it uh necessarily by engaging and uh and this
smiling exercise. Uh. Likewise, it should point out though, that
that there are other things that exercise the one does
with your your face that I would that could possibly
play a role here, being, for instance, just moving your

(55:55):
face around in hot ways, or making what is referred
to as line and face where you can just make
an exaggerated like uh, you know, childish, cartoonish monster face
out of your own face, and like that can be
kind of a way of potentially just like clearing whatever
is physically going on with your face that could be
exerting this mild influence on your emotional disposition. Yeah. Well,

(56:17):
I I wouldn't be surprised if there could be like
a making monster faces in the mirror therapy kind of thing,
Like you make your monster faces in the mirror and
then there's some kind of change in the emotional centers
of the brain caused by these facial muscle movements. Yeah,
like maybe it is a signaling. Um, I mean to
get back to the lion thing. Maybe it is some
sort of like dominance and and um uh you know

(56:41):
aggression that is related. Or maybe it's simply like your
brain is not that familiar with it, Like do I
ever make lion face? Uh the rest of the time
in my life? I don't think I really do. So
maybe my I'm just I don't have like a bunch
of you know, emotional material just like lined up for
that particular facial fee. Yeah, And so I would emphasize

(57:02):
again like obviously we don't know how effective this could
be in the long run. It like you say, you
were trying to do something really serious like battle depression
or something. We're not necessarily saying this is the fix
because again the effects are small. We don't know exactly
how effective it would be that kind of thing, or
what way is what ways you could manipulate the scenario

(57:23):
to make it more effective. But like I said, this
is something that does seem like a very low risk
kind of thing to try if you are trying to
manipulate your own moods and emotions, and certainly much you know,
lower risk than a lot of the things people actually
do to try to regulate their emotions, like self medicating
with drugs and alcohol and all that, right, Yeah, And
of course, you know, again, I do want to come

(57:44):
back to the fact that there are cultural differences in
the way that we use smiles and um and react
to smiles. So I mean that's always something to keep
in mind as well, like is it a given culture
aware smiling is done more given culture or even a
given individual, where smiling when embarrassed and when embarrassed is
more of a you know, a typical feature, Like how
would that influence any of this? Yeah, I'm sure that

(58:06):
could contribute. Yeah, And then also thinking about like the
full body scenario we're talking about earlier with the with
the the hypothetical apes reacting to each other, Like if
if you're dealing with a smile and it's just you know,
in some of these experiments and it's just isolated to
the face, Uh, is that truly the expression or is

(58:27):
the is this should the smile be part of a
like a broader you know, a physical manifestation. Well, another
thing that makes me think of is, uh, you know,
this came up a little bit when we're thing about
the idea of research that use people who had botox
injections in the face, uh to see you know, if
that affected their emotional cognition. This makes me think more
generally about the relationship between skeletal muscle in the face

(58:49):
and throughout the body and our emotional states and whether
there could be relationships there that we don't fully understand yet,
but that how you use your body contributes to your
state of mind at resolutely. But you know, the great
thing about all this is that is that this is
a wonderful area for individual experience and feedback on this episode.
Like everybody out there has experienced with emotions and have

(59:12):
you ever smiled? Have you ever smiled? Um? Have you
ever frowned? I mean, you know, we've discussed cultural differences
in individual differences, so I would I would love to
hear some details about about that from folks out there. Um,
you know, what are your experiences with being told to smile?
What are your experiences with being you know, encouraged to
smile during yoga? Or laughter? Yoga is a whole other area.

(59:34):
We're talking more about laughter than than just smiling alone there,
but that's very much a situation where the idea is
pretend to laugh until you were laughing. And I've I've
I've tried that. I tried it a few times, and
I find that it works to like a reasonable degree.
Like I don't feel like laughter has possessed me bodily,

(59:54):
like there's some sort of a you know, a demon
uh leeching into me. But I do find and myself
you're looking for well, I don't know. I've not that
I'm necessarily looking for it, but I've seen I've seen
people um overcome with laughter and scenarios like that. Like basically,

(01:00:14):
when I was in high school, I think I visited
a church with a friend where they were doing some
form of faith healing. I'm not sure what the terminology
is for it, but where an individual would be touched
by the pastor and instead of just simply like you know,
falling to the floor being healed of their ailment, they
would begin laughing hysterically. That was the physical manifestation of

(01:00:37):
being touched with you know, the Holy Spirit or whatever
they the description was. So I guess I was kind
of I could not help but think of that when
engaging in laughter yoga, and and so I just want
to drive home that my experience was not a situation
of being overcome by you know, out of control laughter.

(01:00:58):
But then again, the prime wasn't there for that to
be the case either. So you know, could be a
situation where if I were entering into it and people
were saying, yeah, we're gonna do laughter yoga and you're
gonna lose control of your body, then perhaps that would
be more inclined to like to fall into that scenario.

(01:01:18):
Laughter is weird, is what I'm saying. It is. It
is weird. Yeah, It's something we can come back to again.
So uh yeah, if you have any any tidbits from
your life that you would like to share with us,
let us know. In the meantime, check out stuff to
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