Forcing a Smile Can Make You Miserable, New Study Finds

Read Time:11 Minute, 24 Second You know the smile. It goes on somewhere between the back door and the first customer, and it stays on for the whole shift. By the end of it your cheeks ache, your patience is gone, and you cannot quite explain why a day spent being pleasant left you feeling so unpleasant. For years the advice ran the other way. Fake it till you make it. Put on a happy face and the happy feeling will catch up. There was even research behind it. Now there is research behind the other half of it. Forcing a smile, it turns out, has a hard limit — and the scientist who found that limit is the same one who helped prove the original idea. What the New Study Found About Forcing a Smile Researchers at the University of Florida ran an online experiment with 1,201 people and analysed the results from 1,174 of them.

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