II. Smiling and Stress

Smiling speeds recovery when a stressful experience is over.

An interesting research report will soon be published in Psychological Science. The researchers wondered about the effects of smiling on physiological recovery from stress.

Kraft and Pressman (2012) studied 169 college students. Participants were hooked up to a monitor that assessed their heart rate in beats per minute throughout the entire experiment. Heart rate is a simple and reliable way to measure experienced stress — the higher the rate, the more stress someone is experiencing.

After a 10-minute acclimation period, participants were asked to spend two minutes doing a difficult task, using their non-dominant hand to trace a star-shaped design without going off a provided outline.

A five-minute recovery period ensued, followed by another stress-inducing task, submerging one’s hand in ice water for one minute, a painful but not harmful experience. Then there was another five-minute recovery period.

Here comes the gist of the experiment. During the stress tasks (not the recovery periods), participants were assigned to different conditions. Those in the neutral expression control group were asked to hold the ends of chopsticks gently in their mouth while relaxing their face. Those in the standard smiling group did the same while using their muscles, involved in raising the corners of the mouth, thereby producing a facial smile. Those in the Duchenne smiling group held chopsticks cross-wise in their mouths, thereby producing the full-faced smile known as a Duchenne smile.

Half of the participants in each of the two smiling groups were explicitly told to smile. These participants were aware that they should be smiling, whereas other participants were simply told how to hold their faces.

The experiment had five conditions: (1) neutral expression; (2) standard smiling without awareness; (3) standard smiling with awareness; (4) Duchenne smiling without awareness; and (5) Duchenne smiling with awareness. Their heart rate was monitored throughout.

Results were straightforward and as expected. Regardless of their awareness, smiling participants recovered more quickly from stress than those with neutral expressions, and those displaying Duchenne smiles recovered somewhat more quickly than those displaying a standard smile.

So, smiling speeds recovery from stress.

Smile while you are stressed, genuinely if possible. But faking — i.e., smiling with just your mouth — may still be worth your effort. Doing so does not reduce stress in the moment, but it speeds recovery when a stressful experience is over.

Cheers.

III. Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

College personnel everywhere are struggling with students' increased neediness.

A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.

Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when it comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades—they weren’t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?

Two weeks ago, that head of Counseling sent us all a follow-up email, announcing a new set of meetings. His email included this sobering paragraph:

“I have done a considerable amount of reading and research in recent months on the topic of resilience in college students. Our students are no different from what is being reported across the country on the state of late adolescence/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life. Whether we want it or not, these students are bringing their struggles to their teachers and others on campus who deal with students on a day-to-day basis. The lack of resilience is interfering with the academic mission of the University and is thwarting the emotional and personal development of students.”