Showing happiness brings social rewards, but the opposite can happen if people feel pressured to appear happy

Happiness has many social benefits. Happy people tend to be healthier and more successful. They are also more helpful and others often view them more positively, making it easier for them to find companions and influence others.

Most research into happiness focuses on the associations between these benefits and feeling happy. But we think many benefits, especially the social ones, are likely to depend primarily on expressing happiness.

In our new research, which reviews studies examining the social functions of the expression of happiness, we caution against pressuring others to display the emotion.

This difference is important because people can express happiness without feeling it, and vice versa. Some people find it more difficult than others to put on a happy face, and will suffer negative effects in cultures that expect or demand people to consistently appear happy.

Social functions of emotional expression

The simplest function of emotional expressions is to communicate to others how we are feeling. Why this is important depends on the context – we might express anger to deter others from coming closer, or express happiness to draw them in.

In our research, we show that expressing happiness, specifically, can also have important social functions.

By expressing happiness in a way that someone notices, such as by smiling at them, we give them a little gift – a social reward that often feels nice to receive. Since people are generally attuned to and often desire social rewards, they are more likely to behave in a way that attracts these displays of happiness.

By smiling at people when they say and do things we like, we encourage them to continue acting in a similar way.

Other people aren’t the only ones who like receiving social rewards – we do, too. Fortunately, emotions are notoriously contagious. We argue that expressing emotions is important for them to spread to others. When we smile at others, we are more likely to get a smile back, triggering social reward in ourselves as well.

Expressing happiness can also make other people think more of us. A range of studies have found the simple act of smiling can improve observer ratings of attractiveness, sincerity and cooperativeness.

This “halo effect” of expressing happiness can be especially useful in the workplace and in job interviews. In work contexts, expressing happiness has been found to make others see you as more competent and a better leader.

Chimpanzees, and many other animals that live in small groups, groom each other to promote social bonding and cohesion. It has been argued that, as humans began living in larger groups, laughter may have replaced picking fleas off each other as a more efficient social-bonding mechanism. Because laughing can be seen and heard, even at a distance, it can promote social reward and increase bonding among several people at once.

In addition to communicating and eliciting social reward in a group, laughing may also help groups bond by demonstrating shared values. If we all laugh at the same jokes, then we probably share some underlying attitudes about the content of those jokes. The social importance of laughing explains why we tend to laugh a lot more at packed live comedy performances than when watching the same show alone.

Expressions of happiness don’t always have positive effects

The effect of expressions of happiness varied between cultures. A cross-cultural study found smiling people were considered more intelligent in the United Kingdom, Germany and China, but less so in Japan, South Korea and Iran. As we argued previously, the Islamic Revolution led some in Iran to believe that good people look serious or sorrowful. People expressing happiness may therefore be seen as bad, callous or ignorant of the world’s woes.

Perhaps because expressions of happiness confer social benefits, they can become an expected norm. We define groups that expect specific emotions as emotional tribes. A pro-happiness emotional tribe might exclude someone who doesn’t regularly express happiness.

In many societies, including many English-speaking nations, pro-happiness tribalism is common. If you feel you should respond “good” to a greeting of “how are you?”, you may be responding to such pro-happiness pressures.

While many pro-happiness emotional tribes might evolve naturally, there is evidence that some organisations and people actively encourage and enforce happiness norms. For example, the Boy Scouts Law mandates cheerfulness to millions of boys in the United States. Apparently, no one wants to go camping with a whiner.

Workplaces can also be pro-happiness emotional tribes and include feedback on mood in performance reviews.

Even though expressions of happiness have many social benefits, we caution against actively creating pro-happiness emotional tribes. Some people, for personal or cultural reasons, find it more difficult to feel and express happiness.

All of us feel that way sometimes. Expectations of happiness pressure people into expressing happiness even when they have good reason to feel unhappy, anxious or angry – or have no strong feelings at all.

In response many people will fake being happy. Inauthentic emotional expressions have been shown to be exhausting and exacerbate negative feelings for some people. As such, a cultural pressure to be happy places an unfair burden on people who may simply not feel authentically happy.