Voluntary Smiling Changes Regional Brain Activity
- 1 September 1993
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Science
- Vol. 4 (5) , 342-345
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00576.x
Abstract
We used measures of regional brain electrical activity to show that not all smiles are the same. Only one form of smiling produced the physiological pattern associated with enjoyment. Our finding helps to explain why investigators who treated all smiles as the same found smiles to be ubiquitous, occurring when people are unhappy as well as happy. Also, our finding that voluntarily making two different kinds of smiles generated the same two patterns of regional brain activity as was found when these smiles occur involuntarily suggests that it is possible to generate deliberately some of the physiological change which occurs during spontaneous positive affect.Keywords
This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:
- Emotion and Affective Style: Hemispheric SubstratesPsychological Science, 1992
- Facial Expressions of Emotion: New Findings, New QuestionsPsychological Science, 1992
- Asymmetrical Brain Electrical Activity Discriminates Between Psychometrically‐Matched Verbal and Spatial Cognitive TasksPsychophysiology, 1990
- The Mechanism of Human Facial ExpressionPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1990
- Brain electrical field measurements unaffected by linked earlobes referenceElectroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1990
- Approach-withdrawal and cerebral asymmetry: Emotional expression and brain physiology: I.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990
- The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology: II.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990
- Smiles when lying.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1988
- EEG Measures of Cerebral Asymmetry: Conceptual and Methodological IssuesInternational Journal of Neuroscience, 1988
- The expression of the emotions in man and animals.Published by American Psychological Association (APA) ,1872