Some people use pills and potions to make themselves feel happier.

Others engage in zero gravity yoga or other ever-so-slightly silly pursuits to boost their mood.

But it turns out there may actually be a very simple way of cheering yourself up.

Researchers are the University of Texas have just published a study exploring whether facial expressions can change people’s moods.

Smile and your brain might just smile with you (Image: University of Texas)

What they found is that smiling actually does make people happier.

‘Conventional wisdom tells us that we can feel a little happier if we simply smile. Or that we can get ourselves in a more serious mood if we scowl,’ said Nicholas Coles, PhD student in social psychology and lead researcher on a paper discussing the study.

‘But psychologists have actually disagreed about this idea for over 100 years.’

These disagreements ‘became more pronounced in 2016’ when 17 teams of researchers failed to replicate a well-known experiment which suggested smiling can make people feel happier.

‘Some studies have not found evidence that facial expressions can influence emotional feelings,’ Coles added.

‘But we can’t focus on the results of any one study. Psychologists have been testing this idea since the early 1970s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence.’

Coles and his team used a statistical technique called meta-analysis to combine data from 138 studies which tested more than 11,000 participants from around the world.

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This suggested facial expressions have ‘a small impact on feelings’, meaning ‘smiling makes people feel happier, scowling makes them feel angrier, and frowning makes them feel sadder’.

‘We don’t think that people can smile their way to happiness,’ Coles said.

‘But these findings are exciting because they provide a clue about how the mind and the body interact to shape our conscious experience of emotion.

‘We still have a lot to learn about these facial feedback effects, but this meta-analysis put us a little closer to understanding how emotions work.’