Facial expressions are generally thought of as outward responses to internal emotions. One group of composed of both US and German researchers developed an experiment to examine whether the opposite also holds true, namely whether facial expressions can directly influence internal emotions. In one such study, participants were led to believe that the topic of investigation was techniques for individuals with physical impairments. Participants would rate the difficulty of various drawing tasks as well as how funny four cartoons were in the context of holding a pen in one of three ways: with their lips, in their non-dominant hand, or with their teeth. In theory, holding a pen with the lips causes participants to use frowning muscles, the teeth condition results in participants using smiling muscles, and the hand condition was simply used for comparison. These data are summarized in the table below. Various hypotheses were presented prior to the initiation of the experimentation. The leading hypothesis involved self-perception theory, which is a theory of attitude formation in which individuals observe their own behavior and then conclude which attitudes caused such behavior.

Table 1. Ratings of funniness and difficulty. All ratings were made on a scale from 0 to 9, where a lower value stands for lower funniness and difficulty; a higher value for higher funniness and difficulty.

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