What made you smile recently?

Earlier today, when Bambi was out of town, she had a very legitimate reason to smile out of deep happiness upon receiving extremely good news. Of course, she will spare you this reason since it is a strictly private matter. However, this post is an opportunity for her to share with you a wonderful, and almost amusing, social experience related to that smile.

Indeed, the news, or her realization of the impact of the latter, put an instinctive smile on her face, which lasted for a LONG time. In fact, she just could not stop smiling for maybe one or two minutes while walking fast (almost jumping) on internal stairs and outdoors.

While walking in this state of internal happiness, expressed through a smile, she bumped into many strangers. They all seemed to be kindly receptive to the super “smiling” smile on her face. Indeed, each one of them smiled back at Bambi in a spontaneous, kind, and generous way. The more strangers smiled, the more sustainable her initial smile remained stuck on her face. The entire experience was too odd to the point of feeling like a happy, even funny, scene of a movie with lightness and contagious smiles. The scene felt even more amusing because people’s smiles seemed, at times, accompanied with a facial expression, which appeared to wonder: “what is the problem of this odd one :)”?

Why did the above experience of smiling contagion happen, you may perhaps wonder? Yes, Bambi lives in the Maritimes where strangers are friendly with each other on the streets. They often, if not always, smile, greet, and talk to each other. This is part of the enriching human communication in general. However, perhaps more specifically, psychiatric or neuropschological studies can help shed some light on the phenomenon of emotional contagion. For instance, a German study by Wild et al. (2003) investigated the neural correlates of facial reactions of participants when they were looking at pictures of faces expressing emotions, including happiness. The activation of certain brain regions (including the amygdala), was observed when participants smiled in response to pictures of smiling faces (https://shorturl.at/HLSU5).

In conclusion, Bambi allowed herself to share with you an anecdote related to smile. What about you? What made you smile lately? Would you like to share and maybe, by a virtual emotional contagion of some sort, contribute to make Bambi and this blog’s readers smile as well? Even if your day was tough with physical or emotional pain and you may lack the motivation to want to smile, just think of a certain happy moment of your life and maybe try to smile to your own former smile? Or smile to your future brighter days or… to life itself. As the old Arab saying goes, “smile and life will smile back at you“. Please, trust that this is Bambi’s wish for you, regardless of whom you are or where you are right now while reading this post or in your own life journey.