I wonder if...

I recently read the book, Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, a very interesting book.  If you like non-fiction, you may enjoy reading this book yourself.  The reason I mention it here is because I keep thinking about one of the articles in the book involving facial expressions.  Back in the 60’s, 2 men got together to catalog the 46 different facial muscles movements.    University of California, San Francisco, facial expression expert Paul Ekman, PhD and Wallace Friesen, PhD, of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco studied the muscle movements singularly and in combination.  By studying the combinations they could tell the difference between a real and fake smile, an instantaneous expression to forecast a lie, or other emotions such as regret, remorse, fear, etc.  While the two men were working long hours on the facial expressions of anger and distress they both felt horrible.  What they came to realize was that just by generating the muscle movements they were affecting their physiology.  An excerpt from the book below describes the study done to test their theory.

“Ekman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson, who teaches at Berkeley, published a study of this effect in Science. They monitored the bodily indices of anger, sadness, and fear--heart rate and body temperature--in two groups. The first group was instructed to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other was told to simply produce a series of facial movements, as instructed by Ekman-- to "assume the position," as they say in acting class. The second group, the people who were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first.”

So that got me thinking.  If just putting on a face of an emotion can cause the same changes in our body as the actual emotion would, does it work the same way in the rest of our body?  The muscles that tighten up (usually in our neck/shoulders) when we are driving in bumper to bumper traffic or are angry with our boss/spouse/children and keep it locked up inside, do they continue to cause us stress and anger after the event is over if our muscles are still tight?  What came first, the chicken or the egg? 

It also makes me wonder if we feel so good after a massage because it’s just so nice to be touched or maybe loosening up the “stress” muscles actually gets rid of the stress?  Or maybe it’s a little of both.  Maybe regular massage is just a great idea.