An interesting study published in Psychological Science recently builds on the old sentiment that simply seeing someone smile makes you want to smile too. Strangely enough, it has been proven that seeing somebody smile (or even frown) automatically activates the muscles in our face that produce that same expression–whether you want them to or not.
Two psychologists from the university of Amsterdam and the university of Utrecht, did separate experiments to test if words associated with these expressions would produce a similar response. The study showed, oddly enough, that a group of test students who read happy emotion verbs (e.g. “to smile”, “to laugh”) had a significant increase in the activity of their zygomatic major (the muscle responsible for smiling) and those that were given sad emotion verbs (e.g. “to cry”) had a similar increase in the activity of their corrugator supercilii (the muscle responsible for frowning). The results showed that reading happy action verbs always tweaked the smile muscle and not the frown, and vice versa. It is interesting to note though that when students were given emotion adjectives (e.g. “funny”, or “angry”) they exhibited much lower automatic responses to the corresponding muscle. It seems that it is the words associated with the expression itself that produces the response.
A slightly more sinister result was gained in the second experiment. This time students were asked to watch cartoons with the emotion verbs subliminally shown at the beginning of each one. Half of the students who watched the cartoons were prevented from smiling by holding a pen between their lips, while the other half were not. The results interestingly showed that the volunteers found on the whole that cartoons with subliminal smiling-related words were much funnier than those with the frown-related words. Except that is for the students who had their muscles movement stopped by the pen: They did not find the same relationship between the subliminal emotion verb and how funny the cartoons were.
These strange results seem to imply that verbs can not only affect our emotions but directly affect the muscles that express these emotions, which in turn affect our emotions. It seems then that language is not just a bunch of symbols with meanings but also holds a direct physical and psychological tie to our emotions.
It is no wonder that language is such a beautiful thing.
