According to the facial feedback hypothesis, feedback from facial muscles can create or alter emotions. Testing this hypothesis has typically involved asking research participants to create facial expressions voluntarily, or by such involuntary means as holding a pencil in their mouths using their lips or their teeth (the latter requires the use of muscles involved in smiling). In this study, frowning or smiling expressions were involuntarily created using electrical stimulation and produced results consistent with the facial feedback hypothesis. The authors conclude as follows: “The finding that changes in felt emotion can be induced through brief and controlled activation of specific facial muscles….offers exciting opportunities for translational intervention.”

Research on excitation transfer suggests, for example, that people who have been aroused by physical exercise become angrier when provoked and experience more intense sexual feelings around an attractive person than do people who have been less physically active. Physiological arousal from fear, like arousal from exercise, can also enhance emotions, including sexual feelings. This article provides another example, namely that the arousal created by expressing anger in “rage rooms” appears to enhance sexual interest and even sexual activity—in the “rage room” itself or, in some cases, in the parking lot outside!  

This photo taken in a medical office waiting room provides a clear example of how the problem of obesity in North America has influenced institutional furniture purchases.

Lie detectors are not infallible, but people who believe they are infallible may be more likely than non-believers to confess to their crimes. In one small town police station which had no polygraph, a kitchen colander was placed on a burglary suspect’s head and attached by wires to a copy machine on which there was a sheet of paper that read “He’s lying!” When he denied committing the burglary, an officer pressed the “copy button,” and when the “He’s lying!” paper emerged, the suspect confessed.

[Source: Shepherd, C., Kohut, J. J., & Sweet, R. (1989). News of the weird. New York: New American Library.]