A smile might brighten your mood, but new research suggests that forcing yourself to smile over and over can have the opposite effect. When smiling becomes an obligation, especially one tied to financial pressure, it may actually leave people feeling less happy and more irritated.
For years, psychologist Nicholas Coles, Ph.D., studied evidence suggesting that even an artificial smile could make someone feel a little happier. Yet those findings never quite matched his own experiences.
“I used to work in customer service. I actually got written up for my inability to keep smiling at work at an unnamed theme park in Florida,” laughed Coles, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. “So I’m looking at all this evidence I had accrued so far that smiling boosts happiness and realizing it flies in the face of my own experiences in the world.”
That contradiction inspired Coles and his colleagues to investigate what happens when people must keep smiling, rather than simply trying it once. Their findings suggest an important distinction: A brief, intentional smile can provide a small emotional lift, but repeatedly putting on a smile under pressure can undermine happiness.
Testing How Forced Smiling Affects Happiness
To explore this difference, Coles worked with researchers Annabel Dang and Joao Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi to design an experiment that more closely resembled the demands of customer service jobs. Their findings were published on October 1 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“We tried to combine the classic way of studying it in a lab with some extra ingredients that we might see in the real world. We told participants that we would pay them less if they weren’t successfully smiling,” Coles said. “We also controlled the number of times they have to do it, because in customer service, every interaction is another faked smile.”
The online experiment initially enrolled 1,201 people, with data from 1,174 included in the final analysis. Participants were shown images designed to produce different emotional reactions. Some depicted appealing subjects, such as kittens and flowers, while others showed disturbing situations, including theft and mistreatment of animals.
During the experiment, participants either deliberately formed a smile or allowed their facial expressions to develop naturally. Depending on their assigned group, they completed the exercise once or repeated it 10 times.
To introduce an element of pressure, researchers warned half the participants that failing to follow the smiling instructions could cost them $2 from their $6 payment. However, nobody actually lost any money, and every participant received the full amount.
When Fake Smiles Start to Backfire
After completing each task, participants reported how happy they felt. The results showed that the emotional effects of smiling depended on how often people had to do it and whether they felt pressured.
When participants viewed unpleasant images, producing a single smile gave their mood a modest boost. This benefit appeared even among those who had been warned about a possible financial penalty. However, the positive effect weakened when smiling was repeated, and it disappeared when repeated smiles were combined with the threat of losing money.
The pattern was even more revealing when people looked at pleasant pictures. Smiling just once offered little additional happiness compared with allowing their faces to respond naturally. But when participants had to smile repeatedly or felt pressure to do so, their happiness ratings actually fell below those of people who responded naturally.
Further analysis revealed another unexpected consequence. In the pleasant picture conditions, forced smiling was also associated with increased irritation and anger.
“If you only force a smile once without any financial penalties, you can see the improvement in happiness. So what psychologists were seeing in their lab is right,” he said. “But when you make it a little bit more like the real world, where you have to keep repeating it, and if you don’t do it well, you get financial penalties, you see it completely reverse.”
The Hidden Emotional Cost of Smiling at Work
These findings may help explain why expectations to appear cheerful throughout the workday can become frustrating rather than uplifting.
The issue has already sparked controversy in the workplace. In recent years, Target faced widespread criticism over a policy requiring employees to smile when customers came within a specified distance. Although the policy was intended to encourage friendly interactions, Coles argues that such requirements can interfere with people’s ability to express their emotions naturally.
The problem may extend beyond employees. Customers can also feel obligated to respond positively to friendliness that is being imposed rather than offered spontaneously. According to Coles, these expectations limit the emotional freedom of both sides of the interaction.
Could Trying Less to Be Happy Make Us Happier?
After spending years investigating how people can improve their emotional well-being, Coles has begun considering a broader question. Rather than constantly searching for ways to increase happiness, might people be better off placing greater value on simply being content?
His research suggests that efforts to manufacture positive emotions do not always produce the intended results. Sometimes, trying too hard to appear happy can make the experience less pleasant.
“As a society, we have placed such an immense amount of emphasis on trying to make ourselves feel happier than we currently are,” he said, “much less emphasis on just being content with what we have.”