A new study reveals that smiling can sometimes backfire, challenging long-held assumptions about facial expressions and happiness.
Smiling might make you feel happier, but doing it repeatedly under pressure can have the opposite effect. New psychological research suggests that the emotional benefits of smiling depend on how often people do it, whether they feel compelled to, and the circumstances surrounding the expression.
In an experiment involving more than 1,100 participants, researchers found that a single posed smile could provide a modest boost in happiness. However, repeating the expression or facing financial consequences for failing to smile sometimes reduced happiness instead. The findings challenge the assumption that deliberately smiling is always beneficial.
Why a Psychology Researcher Began Questioning Smiling
Nicholas Coles, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, had spent years investigating whether facial expressions influence emotions. Although his earlier research supported the idea that smiling can improve mood, his experiences working in customer service seemed to contradict those findings.
“I used to work in customer service. I actually got written up for my inability to keep smiling at work at an unnamed theme park in Florida,” laughed Coles. “So I’m looking at all this evidence I had accrued so far that smiling boosts happiness and realizing it flies in the face of my own experiences in the world.”
To investigate that contradiction, Coles collaborated with Annabel Dang and Joao Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi on an experiment designed to introduce workplace pressures into traditional studies of smiling. Their findings were published October 1 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Putting Forced Smiles to the Test
The researchers recruited 1,201 people for an online experiment, ultimately including 1,174 in their analysis. Participants viewed pleasant images, such as kittens and flowers, or disturbing images depicting theft and animal mistreatment. Some were instructed to smile, while others were allowed to respond with their natural facial expressions. Depending on their assigned condition, they completed the exercise either once or 10 times.
To simulate workplace pressure, half the participants were warned that failing to follow the smiling instructions could cost them $2 of their $6 payment. Everyone ultimately received the full amount, regardless of their performance. Participants rated their happiness after each task, allowing the researchers to compare how repetition and financial pressure affected their emotional responses.
“We tried to combine the classic way of studying it in a lab with some extra ingredients that we might see in the real world. We told participants that we would pay them less if they weren’t successfully smiling,” Coles said. “We also controlled the number of times they have to do it, because in customer service, every interaction is another faked smile.”
When Smiling Stops Improving Happiness
For participants viewing unpleasant images, posing a single smile produced a small improvement in happiness compared with responding naturally. The benefit appeared even among those warned about losing money. However, repeating the smile weakened the positive effect, and combining repetition with financial pressure eliminated it.
The pattern differed when participants viewed pleasant images. A single posed smile produced little change in happiness, but repeated smiling or the threat of financial penalties made participants less happy than those who responded naturally. Additional analysis indicated that forced smiling under these pleasant conditions also tended to increase irritation and anger.
“If you only force a smile once without any financial penalties, you can see the improvement in happiness. So what psychologists were seeing in their lab is right,” he said. “But when you make it a little bit more like the real world, where you have to keep repeating it, and if you don’t do it well, you get financial penalties, you see it completely reverse.”
What the Findings Mean for Workplace Smiling
The results suggest that research demonstrating the benefits of smiling does not necessarily apply to situations where people must maintain cheerful expressions throughout the day. Repetition and external pressure can change the emotional effects of an otherwise positive facial expression.
The findings also have implications for customer service policies. Target, for example, faced criticism over a policy requiring employees to smile when customers came within a specified distance. Coles argues that such expectations can restrict workers’ freedom to express their genuine emotions while also placing pressure on customers to reciprocate expressions of friendliness.
After years of researching ways to increase happiness, Coles has also begun questioning society’s emphasis on constantly improving emotional well-being rather than accepting existing feelings.
“As a society, we have placed such an immense amount of emphasis on trying to make ourselves feel happier than we currently are,” he said, “much less emphasis on just being content with what we have.”
Reference: “Smiling your way to happiness or misery? Experimental tests of competing perspectives [Registered Report – stage II]” by Nicholas A. Coles, Annabel V. Dang and Joao Francisco Goes Braga Takayanagi, 1 October 2026, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2026.105011
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