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Smiling Boosts Mood- Even When it’s Forced


A recent study from the University of Essex entitled, “Smiling and Frowning Induced by Facial Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (fNMES) Modulate Felt Emotion and Physiology” explored whether electrically induced smiling could influence emotions.

Participants had electrodes placed over their zygomaticus major muscles—those that lift the corners of the mouth.

A gentle electrical current forced a smile or a frown for about five seconds, while researchers measured how positive or negative they felt afterward .

When participants were made to smile, even briefly and subtly, they rated their mood more positively, particularly when paired with pleasant images.

Conversely, forcing a frown nudged mood ratings downward—even if participants weren’t consciously aware of the induced expression .

While the emotional shifts were modest, the effect was striking given that only a few specific muscles were activated—and only for seconds at a time.

Why This Matters: Smiling and Mood

These findings breathe new life into the longstanding facial feedback hypothesis—the idea that our facial expressions can shape how we feel.

Though prior methods like the classic “pen-in-mouth” technique produced mixed results (especially in replication attempts in 2016), the precision of electrical stimulation offers a more controlled way to test how expression directly impacts emotion .

Smiling boosts mood, the study found—even when it’s not genuine.

That mirrors other research showing that adopting a smile (even fake) can trigger neurochemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins—your brain’s natural mood regulators .

What This Means for You

Smiling—even forced—can lift your spirits. If you’re having a rough moment, trying a simple smile might engage neural pathways that bias perception toward positivity.

Facial feedback plays a real, albeit subtle, role in mood modulation. Even small activations of smiling muscles—without emotional imagery—can influence how we feel.

Future applications may go beyond experiments. Some researchers propose wearable devices or therapies that gently stimulate smile muscles to support mood, particularly in mood disorders, though this remains exploratory .

Real-World Angle: How Humintell Readers Can Use It

If you’re curious about applying this to everyday life:

Try holding a slight, intentional smile for 30 seconds. Even if it feels unnatural, the facial feedback may still trigger a mood shift.

For those engaged in emotional training or coaching: teaching controlled smiling—even in the absence of feeling it—might help reinforce positive internal states.

Although electrical stimulation therapy is not yet consumer-ready—and not a substitute for professional mental health interventions—it signals a new frontier in understanding how smiling boosts mood through physiological feedback.

Caveats & Notes

The mood effects were small, and participants often weren’t consciously aware of being made to smile.

Long-term effects remain unknown, and ethical considerations must guide real-world use of facial stimulation.

Smiling is only one factor: meaningful emotional resilience depends on multiple lifestyle and psychological strategies .

Key Takeaways

  • Smiling—even a forced one—can boost mood, supporting the facial feedback hypothesis.
  • Experiment shows a brief electrical smile nudged self-reported positivity.
  • Though the effects are mild, they underline how smiling boosts mood, even without genuine emotion.
  • This opens possibilities for novel mood-regulation approaches, especially when combined with emotional training or clinical care.

This research reinforces how subtle muscle movements can influence internal experience—and it’s a strong reminder that your face doesn’t just express emotion—it helps create it.

Can Smiling Improve Your Mood? Research Says Yes.

The post Smiling Boosts Mood- Even When it’s Forced first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.

Dogs May Use Blinking To Bond With Other Dogs

Did you know? The subtle nonverbal exchange of blinking back at someone who blinks at you helps humans and primates bond. Now according to a new study, dogs may also use blinking as a form of connecting to other canines.

In their study entitled “If you blink at me, I’ll blink back. Domestic dogs’ feedback to conspecific visual cues“, researchers out of the University of Parme, “investigated the behavioral and physiological responses of 54 domestic dogs to videos of conspecifics performing blink”.

Research has already shown domestic dogs tend to blink more around other dogs. They also appear to blink to keep the peace with their canine companions—and humans as well—when tensions rise.

The Methodology

puppy-dog-eyesLead researcher Canori and her colleagues created a variety of 12-second videos of a terrier, a cocker spaniel, or a border collie looking at the camera. In some clips, the dogs were blinking, and in others, they weren’t.

A third set of videos showed the dogs licking their noses, a well-known gesture that can signal eagerness or frustration in dogs.

The researchers then edited the videos and strung them together into 71-second clips. In clips with blinking and nose licking, these movements occurred every 4 seconds throughout the clip.

The team then showed the videos on a large screen and in random order to each of 54 adult pet dogs of various breeds who had never interacted with the dogs in the videos.

Researchers outfitted the canine viewers with heart monitors to assess their emotional reactions and also filmed them to spot blinking and other behaviors.

The Results

A few of the dogs got bored and fell asleep but the rest blinked about 16% more on average when watching the other dog blinking than during the two other kinds of scenes.

They found that when dogs witnessed other dogs blinking, they were more likely to blink. They compared these habits to the other behaviors such as nose licking and remaining still and attentive.

Interestingly, only the blinking caused the mimicry effect. Experts suggests that this nonverbal behavior is similar to when we see others yawn and then yawn ourselves.

The researchers suggests that blinking has been a means to express non-aggressive intentions towards members of their own species.

Reciprocal blinking in dogs might help to:

  • Facilitate social bonds
  • Cope with frustration
  • Communicate non-aggressive intentions

Similar to yawning, researchers believe this behavior is related to emotion contagion; the phenomenon when someone’s emotions lead to or produce similar emotions to others.

Even if the blinking is purely reflexive, the results suggest dogs have evolved to use it in meaningful ways.

Researcher Francesconi notes the animals showed no signs of stress in their faces or heart rates while watching the videos.

“Blinking could be a way, for example, to signal, ‘I’m relaxed, and you can be, too.’”

The post Dogs May Use Blinking To Bond With Other Dogs first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.

Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Read Animal Emotions?

As technology advances, scientists from around the globe have been investigating the use of AI to help recognize animal pain signals.

Through computerized facial expression analysis, this AI technology can quickly and accurately recognize pain signals in animals. In some cases, AI is better at this task than some humans!

This AI technology has been used in animals from sheep to horses to cats.

An example includes the Intellipig System developed by scientists at the University of the West of England Bristol (UWE) and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).

Intellipig examines photos of pigs’ faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress.

Facial Expressions in Animals

Scientists assess an animal’s level of pain by looking for telltale muscle movements around the eyes, ears, and other facial features. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems make similar judgments by measuring the distance between “landmarks” on the face (orange and teal dots).

Like humans, animals convey how they’re feeling through their facial expressions. In fact, humans share 38% of our facial movements with dogs, 34% with cats and 47% with primates and horses.

But, as an article in Science points out, “the anatomical similarities don’t mean we can read animals’ faces like those of fellow humans. So, researchers studying animal communication often infer what an animal is experiencing through context”.

An example of this is pain; researchers studying animals can induce mild discomfort or be cognizant of pain signals after an invasive procedure such as castration.

After spending countless hours observing the faces of animals in painful or stressful situations, scientists can then compare them against animals who are pain or stress-free.

As a result, scientists developed “grimace scales” which provide a measure of how much pain or stress an animal is experiencing based on movement of its facial muscles.

In addition, like the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) used on humans, experts have also become skilled at coding facial movements in animals (AnimalFACS).

Amazingly at present, the FACS system has been adapted into 8 different species and their manuals are freely accessible through the animalfacs.com website:

  • ChimpFACS: common chimpanzees
  • MaqFACE: rhesus macaques
  • GibbonFACS: hylobatid species
  • OrangFACS: orangutans
  • DogFACS: domestic dogs
  • CatFACS: cats
  • EquiFACS: domestic horses
  • CalliFACS: marmoset species

However, coding work is incredibly tedious, and human coders need 2 to 3 hours to code 30 seconds of video.

This is where AI comes in.

AI can do the same task almost instantaneously, but first it must be taught.

Teaching AI to Read Animal Faces

AI systems are becoming faster and more accurate than humans at determining whether an animal is in pain. That’s partly because they can identify the tiniest muscle movements and find new indicators of pain that humans are not even aware of.

At the University of Haifa, scientists Anna Zamansky and her team have been using AI to pinpoint the subtle signs of discomfort in animals’ faces.

There are many steps in teaching AI to read animal faces.

These steps include:

  1. AI learning to ID parts of the face crucial to creating expressions (this is done by manually flagging important parts of the face associated with specific muscle movements).
  2. Feeding AI a plethora of landmarked photos to teach it to find landmarks on its own.
  3. AI identifying specific facial expressions by analyzing distances between landmarks.
  4. Cross referencing expressions against grimace scales to determine signs of pain or distress.

Zamansky’s team trained their AI on photos of Labrador retrievers who were either eagerly anticipating a treat or were able to see the treat but were prevented from reaching it.

Their AI was able to successfully detect whether the dog was happy or frustrated 89% of the time.

The AI also successfully differentiated happy and frustrated horses in the same experiment.

Despite some limitations to their technology, Zamansky’s team is about to release an AI based app that will allow cat owners to scan their pets’ faces for 30 seconds and get easy to read messages.

The technology also extends to horses- researchers in the Netherlands have developed a similar app that scans resting horses’ faces and bodies to estimate their pain levels.

This app could potentially be used in equestrian competitions to improve animal welfare and fairness in the sport.

The post Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Read Animal Emotions? first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.