Unlike in the 1988 study, the experimenters used a video camera to record the participants in order to exclude those not holding the pen correctly, which could have made them self-conscious and suppressed their emotional responses. He wrote a commentary, which was published along with the replication study, in which he argued that the studies may have been affected by two potential shortcomings. “It’s quite convincing,” he says.īut Strack disagrees. And 16 of the experiments tested enough people for there to be statistical confidence that even if the studies had been repeated many more times, the researchers would have found the same null result, says Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam who led the analysis. Overall, the experiments found no difference in the way people with pen-induced smiles or frowns rated the cartoons. They describe the collective results of 17 experiments, with a total of nearly 1,900 participants, in a paper published on 26 October in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. In 2011, for example, researchers reported that injections of Botox, which affects the muscles of facial expression, dampen emotional responses.īut as part of a growing trend to reproduce famous psychology findings, a group of scientists revisited the experiment. The paper has been cited more than a thousand times, and has been followed by other research into facial feedback. Strack’s study has been quoted as a classic demonstration of what’s known as the ‘facial feedback hypothesis’-the idea that facial expressions can influence a person’s own emotional state. Strack chose cartoons from Gary Larson's classic 1980s series, T he Far Side. In 1988, Fritz Strack, a psychologist now at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues found that people who held a pen between their teeth, which induces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than did those who held a pen between their lips, which induced a pout, or frown. A large, multi-lab replication study has found no evidence to validate one of psychology’s textbook findings: the idea that people find cartoons funnier if they are surreptitiously induced to smile.īut an author of the original report-published nearly three decades ago-says that the new analysis has shortcomings, and may not represent a direct replication of his work.
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