Review Of The Article Grin And Bear It

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Review of the Article Grin and Bear It
Grin and Bear It is an article written by Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman with the aim of investigating whether positive facial expressions can be manipulated to affect how people respond to stress. A group of 179 people were involved in conducting the investigation. The research took place in two stages that are the training phase and the testing phase. In conducting the training stage, the people participating were split into three strata, and each stratum had the opportunity to use the different facial expression. The members had to grasp on to some chopsticks in their mouths at the same time engaging their facial muscles to build up a smile (a standard one), a neutral expression or a Duchenne smile. Chopsticks was a good choice because they have the ability to cause a smile on people without their awareness. Only a total of 50% of the group members were asked to put on a smile (Kraft and Sarah 1-3).
The testing phase begun after the training phase was over. In this phase, the participants were given various activities to work on without their awareness of the fact that the activities were made in such a way that they would be stressful. The first stressful activity involved the participants finding a star using their less dominant hand by looking through a mirror to view its reflection. The last activity involved the participants immersing one hand in ice water. Throughout this phase, the chopsticks were still in the participant’s mouth.

The researchers then took a record of e participants’ heart rate (one at a time) and stress level.
The findings showed that after the stressful activity participants that had been asked to smile, specifically, the Duchenne smile had a heart rate much lower than those who had neutral expressions. The member participants that had chopsticks in their mouths which resulted to them smiling without necessarily wanting also to show a level of decrease in positive effect than those putting on neutral expressions. The conclusion arrived at is that having a smile during stressful times helps to reduce body stress whether or not a person is experiencing happiness.
Work Cited
Kraft, Tara L., and Sarah D. Pressman. “Grin and bear it: The influence of manipulated facial expression on the stress response.” Psychological Science 23.11 (2012): 1372-1378.