“WHOO-HOO – ING,” in The New Year, with a SMILE!
Move over misery. “haha” Happiness may love company even more.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School 
and the University of California, San Diego, found that happiness may stem more from a group effort than from one person’s lifestyle and choices. The 20 year study of 5,000 individuals shows that a person’s positive emotional state is actually contagious, affecting not just her immediate social circle, but her friends’ friends, and even friends’ friends’ friends. The upbeat vibes ripple out to touch those she’s never met with the effects lasting up to a year.
When we make facial expressions, we’re essentially transmitting a packet of information that can be received, read and interpreted by others. By contracting or expanding our facial muscles in different degrees and combinations, we can produce thousands of different messages that provide cues to our overall emotional state, our short-term feelings about our immediate environment, our mental well-being, our personality and mood, our physical health, our creditability and whether or not we view others as being creditable.
Even better news!! Sadness can’t hold a candle to this kind of emotional contagion. Scientific research shows that smiles and laughter actually trigger pleasure centers in the brain, even if artificially induced.
Dr. Paul Ekman believes that there is a brain pathway that allows you to generate your own emotions.
French neurologist Dr. Guillaume Duchenne mapped 100 facial muscles in 1862. In the course of that work, he had something to say about smiling. He pointed out that false, or even half-hearted smiles involved only muscles of the mouth. But “the sweet emotions of the soul,” he said, activate the pars lateralis muscle around the eyes.
He discovered that when lips part and turn up, the eyes crinkle up showing crow’s feet and the upper lip droops slightly, then there is heightened activity in the left anterior region of the cortex of the brain, which is the center for happy emotions. Your brain won’t be able to tell the difference whether you’re really laughing or just faking it.
When you get upset or angry, give it a try, laugh it off and see the difference in yourself and those around you.
Why not start your own cheerful chain reaction? Do something today that lifts your spirits, and you’ll be sending out waves of contentment to those around you – – and beyond.
Even an induced smile can turn your gloominess into an upbeat mood.
Try it now. How do you feel?
“Wishing you the most amazingly happy filled laughter, 2020!”
Much love and laughter, with lots of sprinkles of magic fairy dust.
Laughing Kathryn