SMILING AND ITS EFFECTS PROJECT
Smiling makes you more attractive. It lifts your mood and the mood of everyone around you. It is believed to be infectious and may even make you live longer.
How Smiling Affects your Brain
Each time you smile your brain feels really happy. Smiling activates the release of feel- good-messengers that work towards fighting stress. These messengers help you experience a whole range of emotions, from happiness to sadness, anger to depression.
When a smile flashes across your face; dopamine, endorphins and serotonin are all released into your bloodstream, making not only your body relax but also work to lower your heart rate and blood pressure. Endorphins are natural painkillers – 100%
naturally produced by your own body, without the negative effects of medication.
How Smiling Affects Your Body
When you smile, people treat you differently. You’re seen as attractive, reliable, relaxed and sincere. Scientists found that seeing an attractive smiling face activates your orbitofrontal cortex, the region in your brain processing sensory rewards. This suggests
that when you view a person smiling, you actually feel that you’re being rewarded.
How Smiling Affects Other People
Smiling is infectious, because the part of your brain that is responsible for your facial expression of smiling when happy or mimicking another person’s smile is located in the cingulate cortex, an unconscious automatic response area. In a Swedish study, subjects were shown pictures of different emotions, including joy, fear, anger, and surprise. The participants were told to frown when shown a smiling person. Instead, as you might have already guessed, participants echoed the emotions of the people rather than following the researcher’s instructions.We can’t always control what happens to us, but smiling and laughing more often can
really change your internal and external experience, and brighten your perspective on life. So just keep smiling!
The project.
The professor will select a group of three or more students to go to a public place (mall, flea market, bus station, college campus, park, beach, downtown, etc.). This group will prepare themselves to select a location. Each student will take turns in smiling to
complete strangers. The other two students will be the observers of the effects of not only the strangers, but of the student themselves. The students will randomly select different people from the community and smile to them. The range of smiling can be from a fake smile, a smirk, or full blown smile with a laugh attached to it. There are a minimum of 30 observable smiles per student to men and women from our society.
You are smiling to babies, toddlers, teenagers, young adults, middle aged, and elderly.
Separate your smiles evenly among your sample strangers. There is no need for interaction from the smiling student; however, the other two students must be able to be nearby to see the reaction of the general public and observe it’s effects.
The group will share the entire load of organizing a day to do this research, taking turns in smiling, writing the observation, writing the essay, and making the graphs.
Each person of the group will assist in writing the five (5) page essay (introduction – body – conclusions) which explains your entire work of where you went for the smiling, the effects of the public, the effects of the student, and the final thoughts of all three students after completing this project. The final page of this project would be to make two (2) graphs which depict your findings. The graphs have to be quantitative which depict your results of your study.
Assignment Overview
You will write a five (5) page essay of your findings after there has been 30 smiling interactions from your team. Page one is the cover sheet with all student’s names, page two through four is your essay, and page five is your graphs.
Instructions
To successfully complete this assignment follow the steps below:
1. Get assigned into a group. Get to know your group.2. Within the group, plan a day or days to go within your community to begin smiling.
3. Smile to 30 strangers, (10 per student) of people of your community.
4. Each member of the group will submit the same graphs. This graphs will have a cover page with the class name, date, professor’s name, and the names of all students within the group.
5. Submit the graphs using Canvas.
6. The group will create four (2) graphs depicting quantitative data of your research.
Submit your essay and graphs using Canvas.
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