Election 2024: Is Smiling More the Key to Democratic Success?

Something that has come up over and over again in the comments section and in my political psychology reading is the effect of prolonged and chronic stress on the electorate. We are a deeply unhappy country, living through very stressful and uncertain times. Some of it is a natural result of more and more severe weather events and natural disasters like the million acre wildfire in Texas and Oklahoma. Some of it is unnatural like the weekly threat of government shutdown and default on the national debt that the Republican Party has created. And some of it is the result feeling helpless in the face of huge forces that we cannot hope to understand or control like severe weather events and the disinformation being spread about Biden’s age, our economy, and crime.

All of the peppy full of pithy, good advice to make a happier, healthier YOU! blogs here on WordPress will tell you that exercise is one way to deal with stress and so is volunteering or helping someone else. Both change your inner chemistry and help slide the balance towards what the body needs to thrive. Recent studies suggest another simpler and much more easily instituted way of helping alleviate not only your stress, but also, the stress of others: smiling.

We’ll go over the science before getting into how smiling more will help save our democracy:

The Science of Smiling: Affecting the Perception of Emotions

The Frankenstein Smile Example

It’s long been known that if you smile, you’ll interpret the world as being a happier better place. The good folks over at the University of Essex conducted a study in which they used a TENS unit-like device to cause the facial muscles controlling the mouth to contort into a smile for 500 milliseconds.

It’s a cool experiment for several reasons: First, it used a technique Duchenne de Boulogne developed and that Charles Darwin wrote about using electricity to induce precise smiles. Second, it was very controlled. They could induce an exact smile using only the muscles necessary, meaning there was no bleed over of other emotions or any confusion by participants over what a smile looks like. And third, they could control the exact amount of time the muscles contorted so that they could establish a minimum smile duration to have an effect. If you’re a nerd like me, that’s all pretty darn cool.

Don’t worry, no one was harmed by the electrical current; they weren’t producing REAL Frankenstein smiles.

The participants were shown pictures of faces with neutral or even sad expressions. The ones who were electrically smiling perceived the faces as happier than those who weren’t. They perceived the world as being a happier place.

THE CONCLUSION: If you smile, then the whole world smiles with you, or, at least, you think so, and thinking so is enough. We’ll comeback to this in a moment.

The Go Ahead and Smile Example

Way back in 2015, researchers at the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit (CNRU), City University London did a less precise experiment than the one above, but came up with the same conclusion.

These researchers asked their participants to adopt either a neutral or happy expression as they looked at pictures of smiling or neutral people. This time, though, they used an EEG to monitor brain waves and found that when the participant was smiling, the brain wave profile for produced when looking the neutral expressions were the same. In other words, they were processing or perceiving the neutral expressions as being smiling, or one presumes happier.

The strength of this study is that they used the EEG to determine the outcome and not reports from the participants, thus avoiding any biases the people may have had.

THE CONCLUSION: When you smile, you think the world is a happier friendlier place.

Smile! You’re Resisting the #GOPDystopia!

Let’s couple these findings with  Timothy Snyder‘s thoughts on resisting fascism. Snyder is a historian specializing in Twentieth Century European authoritarianism. He rose to fame during the #resistance when he published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century in 2017.

In On Tyranny: Eight Lessons for Resisting the Fascisting of America, we reviewed eight of Snyder’s recommendations. Among them, these came to mind:

• #12 MAKE EYE-CONTACT AND SMALL-TALK. As it turns out, resisting a fascist regime is a lonely business. The violence and risk are real. People are understandably scared. People will go to jail and some will or maybe a lot will die. It makes feeling connected to others a very important when resisting an oppressive regime. Smiling will help others feel less oppressed, helpless, and hopeless. It will help people feel more understood and accepted. It really will help relieve some of the stress and strain of daily life.
• #13 PRACTICE CORPOREAL POLITICS. We actually have to meet, see, and talk to each other. Ultimately, societies take place between actual human beings. We have to get out of the house and onto the streets, so when you’re at the grocery store or out and about, go out of your way to smile and make someone’s day. It doesn’t matter what their politics is, it matters how much stress they’re feeling. Isolation and stress makes us all a little or a lot more vulnerable to being manipulated. We can, one person to another, do small things like smiling and exchanging kind words to destress and de-isolate each other.
• #7 BE REFLECTIVE IF YOU MUST BE ARMED. When Snyder talks about this one, he includes getting out of your comfort zone. To be an effective resistance, we must work with people who are not like us. It is going to take people from all the socioeconomic levels, all walks of life, all ethnicities, and all gender identities. When you do meet these people, smile, be friendly. You’d be surprised at how far a smile will take you in new and strange situations.
• #8 STAND OUT. Authoritarian regimes rely on people being meek and avoiding attention. We have to be active. We have to be happy warriors. When we go through our day-to-day life trying to energize and lift up the pro-democracy forces and allies, we should be happy, hopeful, and optimistic. Even false optimism can inspire others. That smile you wear can influence others to smile and see the world as a better place.

When we’re stressed, we’re often advised to do something to help someone else. It helps us experience our own agency, to have some effect in the world. Stress helps back us into a corner with the feeling of fight, flight, or freeze as being our only options. Smiling is a small thing, but it helps alleviate the doom and gloom that so many are feeling right now. It gives us back some control over a situation that feels out of control and like we’re just jumping from crisis to crisis.

Image Attribution

This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, Illustrate the phrase, smile and the whole world smiles with you