Smiling can make you happier — unless someone forces you to do it

Nicholas Coles, Ph.D., had long heard that forcing a smile can make you feel a little happier — after all, he had done a lot of the research that supposedly proved it.

But something didn’t sit quite right with his own findings.

“I used to work in customer service. I actually got written up for my inability to keep smiling at work at an unnamed theme park in Florida,” laughed Coles, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. “So I’m looking at all this evidence I had accrued so far that smiling boosts happiness and realizing it flies in the face of my own experiences in the world.”

With a new experiment trying to recreate his own customer service days, Coles’ team discovered a new caveat to the old research. While a single, pleasant smile can temporarily boost your mood, being forced to repeatedly smile unnaturally can make you miserable.

Coles and his co-authors, Annabel Dang and Joao Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi, published their findings Oct. 1 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“We tried to combine the classic way of studying it in a lab with some extra ingredients that we might see in the real world. We told participants that we would pay them less if they weren’t successfully smiling,” Coles said. “We also controlled the number of times they have to do it, because in customer service, every interaction is another faked smile.”

The researchers recruited 1,201 people for an online experiment, with 1,174 ultimately included in the analysis. Participants viewed either pleasant pictures, including kittens and flowers, or unpleasant ones, including theft and animal mistreatment. They were asked to either pose a smile or let their faces respond naturally, repeating the exercise once or 10 times. Half were also told they could lose $2 of their $6 payment if they failed to follow instructions. In fact, everyone received the full payment.

After each task, participants rated their happiness. A single posed smile provided a small lift when they were looking at unpleasant pictures, even among those warned about losing money. Repeating the smile diminished that benefit, and combining repetition with the financial threat erased it.

The results were even more striking when participants were looking at pleasant pictures. A single voluntary smile did little to change their mood. But repeated or pressured smiles actually made them feel less happy than simply responding naturally. An additional analysis found that forced smiles in those pleasant settings also tended to increase irritation and anger.

“If you only force a smile once without any financial penalties, you can see the improvement in happiness. So what psychologists were seeing in their lab is right,” he said. “But when you make it a little bit more like the real world, where you have to keep repeating it, and if you don't do it well, you get financial penalties, you see it completely reverse.”

In many ways, the results are intuitive. In recent years, Target was excoriated for a new policy that forced their workers to smile when customers got within a certain distance. That kind of policy, Coles said, reduces the emotional autonomy of both workers and customers – who are themselves forced to respond to the fake kindness.

After years of studying ways to make people happier, Coles said he wonders whether people might benefit from putting less effort into improving their moods and more into appreciating what they already have.

“As a society, we have placed such an immense amount of emphasis on trying to make ourselves feel happier than we currently are,” he said, “much less emphasis on just being content with what we have.”