Force a Smile: Unhappy People Tend to Avoid Fun Activities
When people are unhappy, they often engage in enjoyable activities to override their negative feelings. For example, they might choose to watch TV or listen to uplifting music. However, for people who are uncharacteristically unhappy, merely imagining an enjoyable activity before doing it can reduce their willingness to actually go and do it.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposed that unhappy people avoid unenjoyable activities because imagining it is too mentally difficult.
The researchers suggested that when someone is unhappy, their negative feelings and bodily reactions are incompatible with those elicited by the thought of an enjoyable activity. This incompatibility causes them to view the activity more unfavorably than they would otherwise.
Thus, the researchers proposed the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Difficulty imagining engaging in enjoyable activities will affect how favourably people rate these activities.
Hypothesis 2: Getting unhappy people to smile as they imagine an enjoyable activity will help increase the likelihood that they will then go to do that thing.
Hypothesis 3: Getting unhappy people to focus on the outcome of performing an enjoyable activity (rather than the process) will also increase the likelihood.
The study & findings
Several experiments were performed to test the researchers’ hypotheses. In the first experiment, participants were divided into two conditions. In the negative mood condition, participants were asked to describe a personal experience that made them unhappy. In the neutral condition, participants had to describe a typical day in their life.
The participants were shown two advertisements, one displayed an image of a coffee shop and the other displayed a bar. Participants were asked to imagine themselves reading a book at the coffee shop (neutral activity) and having a party at the bar (enjoyable activity).
Participants were also further divided into two more conditions. In the misattribution condition, participants were misled into believing that people find it difficult to read multiple ads after completing a writing task. This was meant to have participants think that the lack of enjoyment was because of some other (incidental) reason, in this case reading multiple ads (rather than their negative mood).
The results of this experiment provided support for hypothesis 1. Participants in the negative mood condition had difficulty imagining doing the enjoyable activity. When participants attributed this difficulty to the enjoyableness of the activity, they preferred it less.
However, when they believed that the difficulty imagining the enjoyable activity was due to an arbitrary reason (i.e. difficulty reading multiple ads), they were less likely to oppose the enjoyable activity.
The next experiment examined how facial expressions play a role in unhappy people’s response to imagining enjoyable activities. Like the previous experiment, participants were divided into a negative or neutral mood condition by sharing a negative or neutral life experience, respectively.
Then, they were asked to hold a biscuit between their teeth (inducing a smile) while imagining singing either an enjoyable song, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” or a neutral song “Silent Night.”
As expected, those in the negative mood condition preferred the enjoyable song less. However, activating the facial responses associated with smiling reduced this incompatibility, thus reducing participants’ aversion to the enjoyable song. This experiment provided support for hypothesis 2.
In the following experiment, the researchers divided participants into a negative or neutral mood condition. Like the previous experiment, they were asked to consider the songs “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “Silent Night”.
In the activity-focused condition, participants were asked to imagine how they would feel while singing the songs. Participants in the outcome-focused condition were asked how they’d feel after singing the songs.
Replicating the earlier results, they showed that participants in the negative mood condition preferred singing the enjoyable song less. However, asking them to think about how they’d feel after singing the song, increased their preference for the enjoyable song. This provided support for hypothesis 3.
To recap, the researchers found that unhappy people have a hard time imagining engaging in enjoyable activities, which drives them to avoid these activities. Their imagination-related difficulties may be due to the incompatibility between their negative bodily reactions and the positive nature of these activities.
However, unhappy people’s aversion to enjoyable activities can be reduced by: (a) inducing them to smile while imagining engaging in these activities and (b) being outcome-focused, as opposed to process-focused.
The results of the studies have everyday implications for how people regulate their negative emotional states, and how people with depression/anxiety in particular build strategies for reducing symptom intensity and duration.