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  • Does Smiling Help Against Stress?

    Does Smiling Help Against Stress?

    It’s an old saying that laughter is good for you. People report feeling healthier and stronger after a good laugh. However, might there possibly be any truth behind this? What happens when you are stressed and not in the mood to laugh? What good does smiling do for you? Does it make you live longer? As early as the Bible, people recognized the healing power of humor and laughing. A laughter’s remedial powers continue to be covered extensively in both the scientific and popular press. However, only a fraction of this subject has been systematically investigated.

    Suppressing pain and stimulating the immune system

    Nonetheless, it’s widely accepted that a good belly laugh stimulates our immune system. Scientists discovered this with 52 willing participants in a 2001 study. Several types of immune cells, including killer cells crucial for warding off illness, were substantially more active in the blood when the young men had just viewed a comedic film and laughed.

    Intense bouts of laughing have been shown to alleviate pain. British scientists found that this was due to the fact that it prompted the body to produce its own opioids, hence reducing the body’s production of pain-signaling molecules. Researchers found that participants with a history of laughing had a greater pain tolerance than those who had not recently experienced laughter.

    Yet another way in which laughing may alleviate stress is by lowering blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is often elevated when people are under pressure. The levels of cortisol, however, fall significantly following a bout of laughing. This means that laughing immediately mitigates the stress response. Laughing also counteracts the suppressive impact of stress on the immune system.

    Put on a forced smile and you’ll see results

    Okay, but what about smiling? After all, it’s not often that you can laugh heartily and for an extended period when under pressure. According to the preliminary research that even a forced laugh or smile might have an impact. 22 participants were prompted to laugh, smile, or howl like wolves at various points during the research.

    All participants were interviewed and given tests to measure their emotional states before and after each of these occurrences. The results showed that howling did not have any effect on the test subjects’ moods, but that forced laughing and smiling had a considerable positive effect.

    The mere act of raising the corners of your mouth

    Even when you merely raise the corners of your mouth in an artificial smile, it still helps. This is what a group led by psychologist Tara Kraft from the University of Kansas discovered. Scientists were curious to know whether or not the mere act of contorting the facial muscles in a smile had any beneficial effects, regardless of the test participants being conscious that they were smiling.

    Kraft accomplished this by subjecting 169 test volunteers to stress by having them hold chopsticks with their lips while completing computer-based activities under time constraints. Half of the volunteers were instructed to smile while the other half were told to keep a neutral expression throughout the experiment. The reason for this was that everyone had to reflexively bend their lips and facial muscles as if they were smiling, to maintain the chopsticks in their mouths.

    The findings of this study demonstrate the physiological effects of smiling, even when we are unaware of doing so. This is because throughout the stress activities, the heart rates of all participants who had previously held chopsticks stayed much lower than those of control subjects who had done the tasks without chopsticks. Facial muscle contractions reduced not just objective measures of stress but also subjective assessments of it.

    Try forcing a smile the next time you’re stuck in traffic or going through any other stressful situation. This helps counteract the bodily manifestations of stress, in addition to enhancing your public persona right away.

  • How to Remember People’s Faces Better

    How to Remember People’s Faces Better

    The fact that some individuals can remember a person’s face from decades ago is a fascinating phenomenon. An experiment shows that those who are very good at recognizing faces look at a new face in a different way than the average person. They seem to observe people’s facial characteristics as discrete puzzle pieces with less emphasis on the eyes. Because of this, they are able to distinguish even fragments of faces.

    In most cases, a quick glimpse is all that’s required. In a few milliseconds, we can tell a friend or family member from a stranger just by looking at their face. Actually, facial recognition has its own section in the human brain. However, not everyone has the same capacity for recalling faces. Some people have trouble remembering people’s faces, even their own, while others, known as “super recognizers,” never forget a face they’ve seen.

    How Does It Work?

    But how can super-recognizers remember every single face they’ve ever seen? People who claim to recall everyone they’ve ever met may really only have an above-average visual memory, suggesting that this skill has nothing to do with training or general photographic memory. This indicates that the only areas of the brain responsible for facial recognition are enhanced or may function differently in these people compared to “normal” people.

    However, the specifics of how visual information is processed during facial recognition remain unknown. The question is, do super-recognizers take in and recall new faces as a whole, like a picture, or break them down into separate aspects for analysis and storage?

    A Creative Face Test

    Researchers tested the abilities of 34 “super-recognizers” and 26 “regular” participants to see who performed better at remembering faces. Every participant in the study was given a series of random, unfamiliar faces for five seconds and then asked to recall as many details as possible about those individuals. However, they did so while wearing special measurement glasses that, depending on the trial, either revealed the whole face or obscured all but a small percentage of it. This means that they had to scan each portion of their face separately.

    This gave insight not only into the specific visual information being processed by the individuals but also into the particular locations to which their gaze was being directed. This is due to the fact that participants in the face identification test also wore glasses, limiting their peripheral vision.

    Super-Recognizers Look at People’s Faces Differently

    The super-recognizers outperformed the comparison participants across the board, even though they had a recognition threshold of just 12% of the face. The research indicates that super-recognizers were able to more accurately reconstruct an individual’s face from a series of pieces displayed sequentially during the test. Therefore, this contradicts the hypothesis that super-recognizers form an overall impression of a face and preserve it as such.

    Concurrently, the face experiment demonstrated that super-recognizers scan a face differently than people with ordinary facial recognition, with their attention being less concentrated on the eye region and instead scanning other aspects of the face more intensely than usual. Super-recognizers seem to have gathered information more effectively than average observers, based on the quantity and dispersion of their fixations.

    Some Numeric Distinctions

    The study researcher, James Dunn, and his colleagues claim that their trials show that the face recognition skill of super-recognizers is actually numerically, but not qualitatively, different from “regular” face recognition.

    That’s because, much like every other human being, their brains evidently don’t take a static picture of a face but rather remember its defining traits. However, they have the benefit of being able to swiftly and reliably piece together visual information from disparate sources.

    Interestingly, the more exceptional the face recognizers are, the more their scanning times diverge from those of “regular” individuals in the test. However, the study notes that very comparable anomalies are also discovered in patients who are “face blind.” Prosopagnosic people tend to look about rather than directly at their counterparts, which may be an indicator of the condition.

    The findings of this study can be utilized to help people with below-average face recognition skills have superior visual scanning while also contributing to the already superior performance of super-recognizers.

  • Why Does Our Face Blush? Scientific Reason

    Why Does Our Face Blush? Scientific Reason

    In order to succeed while public speaking, singing, or performing, you need confidence. Unfortunately, when it all comes down to it, our faces tend to blush with excitement, which may make us feel even more vulnerable. Sometimes all it takes to blush is the notion of thinking about it. Why, then, does it always seem like this sudden heat sensation in our faces starts to rise suddenly at the worst possible time?

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    For what reason do we feel the need to hide our faces?

    Sports and saunas are two other scenarios where people often blush; for others, a warm room or the ingestion of alcohol could be the trigger. The physical effort increases blood circulation in the body, so we blush. These cases of blushing are easily explained. However, the phenomenon known as “social blushing” is different.

    When we’re put in circumstances that make us feel threatened, ashamed, or furious, the muscle tension increases as a result of the adrenaline rush. The autonomic nervous system responds to stress by activating the so-called sympathetic nervous system, which speeds up many of the body’s processes.

    A Response by the Autonomic Nervous System

    Brain sends hormones into the body that cause blood pressure to rise. Concurrently, the heart rate accelerates and more blood is pumped to the brain.

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    The face becomes red because the blood vessels expand and the blood flow rises. This is due to the fact that the face has an exceptionally rich capillary bed. Sweaty palms are a common occurrence of blushing. But this is a totally typical physiological response for a healthy human being.

    A person’s sensory threshold determines how and how frequentlythey blush. An individual’s susceptibility to stress is also important when it comes to blushing. There are doctors who specialize in helping people with erythrophobia (an abnormal fear of blushing). The prevalence of congenital disorders of sympathetic nervous system regulation is estimated to be roughly 1 in 200 persons according to studies. This causes the individuals to become visibly more agitated and flushed with anger than usual.

    An Evolutionary Defense Mechanism

    Mark Twain, an American novelist, once said, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” His elucidation was spot-on, and it demonstrated that there is more to a blush than merely a surge of blood to the face. Blushing makes our feelings obvious, since our face flushes red mostly from embarrassment or when we are stressed out for something.

    However, the exact mechanism of why a person’s face becomes red when they’re embarrassed still remains a mystery.

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    Many hypotheses have been proposed, but none have been conclusively demonstrated. It has been hypothesized that becoming red in the face in an embarrassing scenario is an evolutionary defense mechanism designed to prevent the individual from being shunned by his social group after committing a violation, which likely meant death in pre-historic times. Turning red in the face serves an “apologetic” purpose, signaling “I realize I made a mistake, I’m sorry.
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    “

    Studies have shown that people who blush after making a mistake in public, such as tripping over their feet in a store, are more likely to be seen with sympathy than pity. They are less likely to believe that the person did the thing on purpose, and thus the person is less likely to be judged harshly or excluded from society. In this sense, blushing may serve as a kind of defense, perhaps against the potential social repercussions of an action.

    There Is a Catch

    However, it’s unlikely that blushing serves any essential purpose. Prehistoric humans, as seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, had uniformly dark skin. Since blushing is only so prominently visible in light-skinned individuals, it makes little sense for it to have a vital survival purpose.

    And being shy doesn’t stick with you forever. It is well known that infants do not blush. This only begins at the age of three, and it reaches its pinnacle around adolescence, when emotional and physical changes make you more vulnerable to the judgmental gazes of others. The volume of blushing frequently decreases beyond that point.

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    Methods Against Blushing

    Even yet, blushing is still embarrassing and humiliating, particularly when it draws others’ notice. Experts propose relaxation and breathing techniques for individuals who blush often; these methods don’t eliminate blushing, but they can release inner stress. Likewise, those who concentrate less on their red faces will feel calmer, which is why talking to others may be helpful in stopping blushing.

    Extreme blushers may benefit from specialized behavioral treatments that aim to identify the causes of their anxiety and then direct them to deliberately seek out social settings where they may blush. Successful treatment usually results in less frequent blushing over time.