Is Smiling An Important Effect On Attitude Change

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Smiling is an important function in expressing your emotions of happiness, amusement, affection or pleasure. It is often thought that you smile because you are happy however it can go the other way as well; you can feel happy because you’re smiling. Parede, Stavraki, Brinol, & Petty (2012) administered an experiement looking at the Impact of facial expressions (smiling) on attitude change. It was hypothesised that ‘smiling would be associated with greater reliance on thoughts than no smiling informing evaluations about the story’ (Parede et al.)The experiment involved 62 university students who were led to believe that they were participating in two separate experiments, one on organizational behaviour and the other looking at psychomotor coordination as this experiment had a blind design. Students were given a story about an employee who was either having a good or a bad day at work and were instructed to write down their thoughts. Participants were then spilt into two groups, one group was instructed to hold a pen between their teeth to subtly induce a smile and the other group bec...

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