Fact or artifact? Demand characteristics and participants’ beliefs can moderate, but do not fully account for, the effects of facial feedback on emotional experience

Abstract

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that an individual’s facial expressions can influence their emotional experience (e.g., that smiling can make one feel happier). However, a reoccurring concern is that demand characteristics drive these effects. To examine this, we had university students pose happy, angry, and neutral expressions and self-report their emotions following a demand characteristics manipulation, wherein we either (a) told participants we hypothesized their poses would influence their emotions, (b) told participants we hypothesized their poses would not influence their emotions, or (c) did not tell participants a hypothesis. Results indicated that demand characteristics moderated the effects of facial poses on self-reported emotion. However, facial poses still influenced self-reported emotion when participants were told we hypothesized their poses would not influence emotion. These results highlight the role of demand characteristics in facial feedback research but indicate that demand characteristics do not fully account for observed facial feedback effects.