Happiness is a Warm Face

By Aaron Reid
October 9, 2010
In 1996, behavioral psychologists Ulf Dimberg and Arne Öhman sought to test if the human mood is independent from its immediate external environment. Their study, Behold the wrath: Psychophysiological responses to facial stimuli investigated the affect of primed facial gestures on the participant’s mood. When I present these findings in talks, I usually tease that only a social psychologist could write a title like that. At Sentient, we affectionately call this study: Why am I so Happy? And the answer, as you will clearly see is, “I have no idea.”
Dimberg and Ohman used cognitive priming as a method to test the effects of exposure to positive and negative stimuli at a subconscious level. Priming is a method in which the experimenter presents the participant with an initial presentation of a stimulus (in this case a picture of a facial expression) and then measures some behavior or attitude of interest to see if the idea implanted behind the stimulus had an unconscious affect on the participant after being primed.
The specific priming technique used in this study is called backward-masking, where the image is digitally flashed in front of the participant long enough for processing at an unconscious level, but not long enough for conscious recognition of the object. The participant is then immediately presented with a neutral image after the prime to literally “mask” the conscious recollection of the prime. Dimberg and Ohman primed participants with facial expressions, ranging from happy to angry, including images of different sexes and ages. After priming, participants’ emotional well-being was measured indirectly through the recounting of either a positive memory or a negative one.
Electroencephalography (EEG) was also used to measure neural activity while participants were primed with different facial expressions. The results of the study, established in psychological research almost 15 years ago, were shocking to say the least.
People unaware they were primed with a smiling face showed significantly elevated feelings of well-being and happiness than the control group. Those who had been primed with angry or fearful faces revealed feelings of lower self-esteem and unhappiness. This stands as remarkable evidence of the influence of the subconscious processing of stimuli in our environment on our moods.
Processing a picture of an angry face for less than 100ms can make an otherwise content person distressed!
Can you imagine how many times in one day your mood state fluctuates due to exposure to some positive or negative stimulus that you are not even aware you’ve processed? And what of those ads you see, with the sexually charged visual stimuli, that “have no impact” on the average thinking human? Feel uncomfortable yet? And finally, consider the implications for market researchers who are constantly asking people explicitly why they feel a certain way about a product? This research would argue that, at least some of the time, people have no idea why they feel the way they do.
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Aaron Reid

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Founder & CEO, Sentient Decision Science, Inc.


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