Fake Smiles Can Apparently Make You Depressed

BBC's "Spot the Fake Smile" test. From Greg Hughes.

Do you often try to smile, even when you're not happy? According to this story from The New York Times, you may actually be worsening your mood. This information comes from a study in the Academy of Management Journal, wherein researchers examined a group of bus drivers for two weeks. Why bus drivers? Because they often smile whenever a passenger gets on their bus, which theoretically gave researchers a large data set.

The study found a difference between "surface acting," or fake smiling, and "deep acting," which is a technique of using positive thoughts or memories to bring out real smiles (similar to method acting, I guess). The researchers had the bus drivers alternate between surface acting and deep acting on different days. On days when the drivers surface acted, they tended to become depressed and withdrawn from work. On days when they deep acted, their moods became more positive and their productivity increased.

These differences in technique affected women more than they did men. Dr. Brent Scott, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and co-author of the study, suspects that cultural norms are to blame. He says that women are socialized to be more emotionally expressive, so hiding their emotions may strain them more.

So the lesson here might be to avoid smiling when you're not feeling it. Instead, try to recall enough positive feelings that your smile comes naturally.

By the way, want to know which of your friends are genuinely happy and which ones are secretly wallowing in an existential morass of boredom and contempt, hidden only by a plastered-on contraction of facial muscles and teeth that they think will dull the pain, but in fact only pulls them deeper down the gaping hole of self-pity that they call life? Then head over to BBC's Spot the Fake Smile test! It only takes a minute or two, and you may not be as good as you think. I scored 16 out of 20! See if you can beat that!

African Americans Closing Racial Gap in Happiness

Source:  New York Times. Click here for the full image.

Black people have long gotten the short end of the stick in America. To this day, black unemployment is double that of whites, just like it was in 1975. The income gap between races is also growing. Today, however, David Leonhardt of The New York Times reports that African Americans are making significant progress in one important category:  levels of happiness.

A new study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists from the University of Pennsylvania, finds that levels of happiness in Caucasians have stayed pretty much the same since the '70s. On the other hand, happiness in African Americans has risen by at least 5% in that same time period. This may not seem like much, but Mr. Wolfers explains that it is "one of the most dramatic gains in the happiness data that you’ll see."

As you can see from the graph, a significant happiness gap still exists, but if Caucasian happiness stays the same (which is likely), the gap may close within the next few decades. The study does not claim to know why the gap is closing, but one theory is the huge drop in racism from the 1970s to now (though of course we still have a ways to go before racism is gone completely).