Forcing yourself to smile repeatedly can actually make you miserable, turning customer service obligations into a source of irritation rather than an emotional lift, Science Daily reported.
University of Florida psychology professor Nicholas Coles launched an investigation after noticing a contradiction between his own customer service work history and psychological evidence. “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,” Coles laughed, telling Science Daily about his inspiration.
Coles worked alongside researchers Annabel Dang and Joao Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi to design an experiment mirroring real-world customer service demands. 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, according to Science Daily.
The online experiment enrolled 1,201 people initially, keeping 1,174 datasets for final analysis. Researchers showed participants images designed to trigger distinct emotional reactions, ranging from appealing kittens and flowers to disturbing situations like theft and animal mistreatment. Participants either formed a deliberate smile or let expressions develop naturally, repeating the exercise either once or 10 times.
Researchers introduced financial pressure by warning half the participants that failing smiling instructions could cost $2 from a $6 payment. No one actually lost money, and every participant collected the full amount.
Viewing unpleasant images and producing a single smile gave moods a modest boost, even among participants facing financial penalty warnings. That positive effect weakened with repetition and vanished entirely when repeated smiles combined with financial threats. Smiling just once at pleasant pictures offered little extra happiness compared to natural expressions.
When participants smiled repeatedly or felt pressure, happiness ratings fell below those of people responding naturally. Forced smiling during pleasant pictures also generated 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,” Coles told Science Daily. “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.”
Target faced widespread criticism in recent years over policies requiring employees to smile when customers entered a specified distance. Coles argues that mandatory cheerfulness interferes with natural emotional expression and limits emotional freedom for both employees and customers.
Coles now questions society’s obsession with manufacturing positive emotions over simple contentment. “As a society, we have placed such an immense emphasis on trying to make ourselves feel happier than we currently are,” he said, according to Science Daily, “much less emphasis on just being content with what we have.”
