Re-enactment of smile helps recall a smile

A new study has recently revealed that people use facial expression to help recall an emotion for example

Jenny Baumeister, SISSA researcher, said that theories of embodied emotion state that in order to process an emotion people first reproduce the facial movements of the expression induced by that emotion.

In practice, if people watch someone smiling, they tend to smile as well in order to appreciate what that person was feeling, she further added.

The research found that performance on the memory tasks with the face in blocked condition was significantly worse than with the face in "free" condition and the data confirmed the hypothesis that "re-enacting" the motor pattern associated with the emotion helps to recall that emotion.

Raffaella Rumiati, SISSA professor said that this suggests that even during the storage phase of memories, people also encode the motor information and re-use it during retrieval.

The study is published in Acta Psychologica.