Is smiling contagious? Does being around happy people rub off onto you and make you happy? Have you ever walked down the street and a stranger smiles at you, and you can’t help but smile back? Small gestures like this can make a difference to others and yourself. Smiling toward others causes a domino effect and brings joy to everyone around you. Surrounding yourself with people who fill your cup and pour into yours makes life more enjoyable overall. Studies have shown that smiling can affect others positively.
The website Monarch Landing states, “The person on the receiving end of a smile feels reassured, at ease, and more connected. The release of endorphins and feel-good chemicals on the part of the person smiling is contagious.” Face-to-face connection is healthy for all humans to endure; often we think too in-depth about what can make us happy, and although doing activities that bring you joy is important, it can also be as simple as smiling at someone or receiving one from a friend or even a stranger in the hallway.
Something this simple can influence the emotions of other people. Smiling illustrates warmth and comfort, and receiving that releases a sense of sadness and happiness. “Smiling is the core expression of joy, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that seeing an upturned smile will light up peers’ moods and even our own. That’s why we must go through life with optimism and positivity by smiling,” says Rylan Guffroti .
“I think smiling is contagious because when a friend smiles at me or laughs, it just puts me in a good mood, or makes me laugh/smile with me,” says Spartan junior Spencer Hoogeboom “I think smiling rubs off on someone because kindness can move like a sickness. Smiling through can pass a train of good energy from person to person,” says Mykena Marley.
Kaity Driskle said, “Smiling is contagious because you can pass it on when someone smiles. It’s a trigger for the next person too,”
“You smile at someone and they smile back naturally and they carry that energy for the rest of the day and that makes the world better day by day,” senior Chase Zaiger said.
The multi-media group went around these high school hallways giving a small smile to students, teachers, administration, and strangers seeing if they would earn a smile back. Two out of twenty-three teachers we smiled at didn’t smile back. However, fifteen out of the twenty-three started up a conversation, asking how we were doing. Four out of four of the administration smiled back at us, and three of them said hello to us as they were walking by. Of students at Doherty High School, fifty-six students out of seventy students smiled back at us. None of them started a conversation with us unless we were acquaintances with them. For our teachers, 8.6% of them didn’t smile back, our administration was 100% with returning smiles, and our students 80% returned our smiles.
Doherty has almost two thousand students here and over a hundred teachers, so we didn’t even scratch the surface of our statistics numbers of this project, but based on the little data we got, this leads us to believing that smiling is contagious if you choose it to be.
“Smiling is infectious” is a common phrase that expresses the idea that when you smile, you can influence the mood and emotions of others around you. It doesn’t harm you to try to uplift someone’s emotions. What I noticed in smiling with students was that they started to smile at me when they would see me after this project. This shows we are friendly towards each other and we want to express there is nothing but positive emotions when we see one another.
In conclusion, we return the smile because most of us can’t help it. We subconsciously mimic the expression we receive. It’s effortless. Smiles during face-to-face conversations strongly impact connection, with the intensity of one person’s smile often influencing the other. We believe there is no harm in smiling and if you can brighten a person’s day with little cost, then you should do it out of the kindness of your heart.
