Is Smiling Contagious?

Have you ever wondered if smiling is contagious? When the old lady at the grocery store smiles at you, can’t you feel the smile spreading across your face? Many people believe that smiling is contagious. On page 8 of David R. Hamilton’s book The Contagious Power of Thinking: How Your Thoughts Can Influence the World, David states, “You only need to flash a smile at someone to raise a smile in them. No matter how hard they try to resist, smiling is contagious.” (Hamilton, 2011) Is David stating his own opinion though? I have no idea how much scientific information David has in his statement, however, I know there has to be research done by real scientists on the contagion of smiles.

A study was done by scientists in Sweden on why people smile when someone smiles at them. They think it’s a person’s “unconscious mind taking control.” Smiling can change our brain. Your brain keeps track of your smiles, and it knows how often you’ve smiled and which overall emotional state you are in. Smiling has different effects on our health, success, and feeling of happiness. Children smile more often; this explains why we often feel happier and smile more around children. On average, children smile 400 times a day. Happy people smile 40-50 times per day, while the average people smile 20 times a day.

What happens to our brain when we smile? Let’s explore a situation. When you see a friend you haven’t seen in a long time neuronal signals travel from the cortex of your brain to the brainstem. From there, the cranial muscle carries the signal further towards the smiling muscles in your face. Once the smiling muscles in our face contract, there is a positive feedback loop that now goes back to the brain, and that reinforces our feeling of joy. A ...

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