Smiling Could Help With Stress
Baku, August 1 (AZERTAC). If you`re feeling stressed, maybe the best thing you can do is crack a smile. New research shows that smiling -- and especially genuine smiling (where your eyes and mouth muscles are engaged) -- may play a part in lowering heart rate after you`ve done something stressful. The study will be published in the journal Psychological Science. "The next time you are stuck in traffic or are experiencing some other type of stress, you might try to hold your face in a smile for a moment," study researcher Sarah Pressman, of the University of Kansas, said in a statement. "Not only will it help you `grin and bear it` psychologically, but it might actually help your heart health as well!" The study included 169 university students who were first trained to hold chopsticks with their mouths (the chopsticks forced them to smile). The researchers trained them to either smile in a standard fashion (where just the mouth is in a smile, but no other facial muscles are being used), a Duchenne smile (where the mouth and eye muscles are used, apparent in a "genuine" smile), or a neutral expression. Then, the researchers had the study participants continue to have the chopsticks in their mouths as they did a series of stressful tasks, such as putting their hands in ice water. The researchers found that those who were trained to smile -- and especially those who were trained to smile the Duchenne way -- had a lower heart rate after the activities. And while you`re at it, maybe you should laugh some, too. Research shows that laughing has a myriad of health benefits, from lowering stress to easing pain to boosting your immune system, according to the Mayo Clinic. Plus, a study from researchers at the University of Maryland Medical Center found that people with heart disease are less likely to laugh than people without the condition -- thereby suggesting there could be a link between laughing and heart health. "We know that exercising, not smoking and eating foods low in saturated fat will reduce the risk of heart disease," Dr. Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at UMMC, said in a statement. "Perhaps regular, hearty laughter should be added to the list." Researchers often class smiles as being of two types: standard smiles, where only the mouth shapes the smile, and genuine or Duchenne smiles, where the muscles around the mouth and the eyes shape the smile. (The latter was named after Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, who used electrophysiology to show how truly happy smiles also use the muscles around the eyes). For their latest study, Kraft and Pressman invited 169 volunteers from a Midwestern university to undergo an experiment in two stages: training and testing. In the training stage, the researchers taught the volunteers how to either hold their faces in a neutral expression, hold a standard smile, or hold a Duchenne smile. They also got some of the volunteers to hold their face in a forced smile by holding chopsticks in their mouths. In the testing phase, the volunteers performed some multi-tasking activities, during which they held their faces in the manner instructed. The activities were designed to increase stress levels, but the volunteers didn`t know this. One test for instance, asks the participant to use their non-dominant hand to follow the path of a moving star that they observe in a mirror. The other test involves plunging a hand into a bucket of ice water. The researchers monitored the participants` heart rates as they performed their various tasks. They found the participants who were instructed to smile, and in particular those whose faces expressed genuine or Duchenne smiles, had lower heart rates after recovery from the stress activities than the ones who held their faces in neutral expressions. Even the volunteers who held chopsticks in their mouths, that forced the muscles to express a smile (but they had not explicitly been instructed to smile), had lower recovery heart rates compared to the ones who held neutral facial expressions. The researchers say their findings suggest smiling during brief periods of stress may help reduce the body`s stress response, regardless of whether the person actually feels happy or not. Pressman said this could be useful to know, for instance if you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, try to hold your face in a smile for a few moments: it may do more than just help you "grin and bear it", it may actually help your heart health too.
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