"Keep smiling" may not be the best piece of advice or coping strategy for some people after all, suggests new research. 
 
 The researchers found that smiling frequently may actually make people feel worse if they're sort of faking it — grinning even though they feel down. When people force themselves to smile because they hope to feel better or they do it just to hide their negative emotions, this strategy may backfire. 
 
 The bottom line of the study: Whether a wide grin will hurt your emotional well-being depends on the motivation behind it, the researchers said. [Smile Secrets: 5 Things Your Grin Reveals About You] 
 
 "Most commonly, people smile when they are happy, because smiling reflects happiness," said Anirban Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor of marketing at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "However, people also smile when they are unhappy, to mask negative emotion or to try and become happy." 
 
 In the latter scenario, people may associate the acts of smiling not only with feeling happy, but also with feeling unhappy, he said. 
 
 In the study, the researchers conducted three experiments in which they examined how frequently people smiled and the motivation behind their expression. In one experiment, 108 people completed surveys asking them how frequently they smiled on the day of the experiment and whether they thought that people usually smile to feel good or to force themselves to feel good. The participants also completed questionnaires that examined how satisfied they were with their lives. 
 
 In another experiment, the researchers recruited a group of 63 people and showed them funny pictures, which the researchers said they were testing for use in future studies. They asked the participants to smile if they actually found the pictures funny. 
 
 And, in the third experiment, the researchers asked 85 people to list situations in which they smiled because they felt happy. The investigators asked the participants to perform facial muscular exercises in which they were told to manipulate their facial muscles to create a smilelike or non-smilelike shape. Then they examined the participants' level of life satisfaction. 
 
 When the researchers analyzed the results of the three experiments, they concluded that those people in the study who did not typically smile when they were happy felt worse when they smiled frequently, whereas the people who often smiled when they were happy felt better when they smiled frequently. 
 
 "More generally, we think that making people who are feeling bad smile could backfire and make them feel worse, because they may interpret smiling as trying to become happy," Mukhopadhyay said. 
 
 "Smiling frequently would remind them of being not happy," he said, advising that the best strategy in such cases may in fact be not to smile until the negative emotion that is making a person feel bad gets resolved. 
 
 So who should smile as much as possible and who shouldn’t? 
 
 People who smile frequently because of their naturally cheerful personality should feel free to just keep smiling, as this may indeed make them feel better, Mukhopadhyay recommended. However, people who don't naturally grin should remember that, for them, a smile is likely just "an attempt to become happy," he said. 
 
 "In practice, I think people can think about their own beliefs about smiling, see how they feel about how frequently they smile and adapt either their beliefs or their behaviors to make themselves feel better," he said. 
 
 The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 
 
 Follow Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article published on Live Science. ||||| Why smiling won’t help if you are feeling miserable: Experts advise letting unhappiness lift before attempting grin to stop brain linking happy act to sadness 
 
 Smiling when unhappy makes people feel worse because it is just a 'mask' 
 
 Hong Kong professor said forcing a grin makes the brain link it to sadness 
 
 Study suggested waiting for unhappiness to subside before attempting smile 
 
 Next time you think about cheering somebody up when they are upset, perhaps it might be best to just leave them alone. 
 
 Trying to make somebody smile when they are miserable could actually make them feel worse, a study has found. 
 
 If you force a friend to grin when they are in a bad mood then their brain starts to associate it with sadness instead of joy. 
 
 The study found that faking a smile won’t cheer you up because it is just a ‘mask’ to inner sadness (file picture) 
 
 And next time they smile it could bring back miserable memories instead of lifting the bad mood. 
 
 The study suggests that the idea of grinning and bearing it might not be the best solution after all. 
 
 It was carried out by Anirban Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor of marketing at Hong Kong University Science and Technology, who said you should wait until your unhappiness lifts before attempting a grin. 
 
 He said: ‘Making people who are feeling bad smile could backfire and make them feel worse, because they may interpret smiling as trying to become happy. 
 
 ‘Smiling frequently would remind them of being not happy’. 
 
 The research team carried out three experiments: in the first 108 people completed a survey asking how often they smiled and whether they felt good about themselves. 
 
 They also reported how happy they were with their lives in general. 
 
 In the second experiment 63 people were shown funny pictures and were asked if they thought they were amusing. 
 
 If you force someone to grin when they are in a bad mood, their brain starts to associate it with sadness instead of joy, the study by Hong Kong associate professor Anirban Mukhopadhyay found (file picture) 
 
 In the third 85 people were asked to list situations when they felt happy and about their overall life satisfaction. 
 
 They were also asked to perform facial exercises to put their faces in a smile like position. 
 
 The study results showed that if you are faking a smile then it won’t cheer you up and that you are just using it to ‘mask’ your inner sadness. 
 
 Professor Mukhopadhyay wrote: ‘Smiling by itself does not increase happiness, or wellbeing. 
 
 ‘Instead, the belief that one must already be happy when one smiles is what increases happiness, and as a result, wellbeing.’ ||||| How do we understand what other people are feeling? We mimic their facial expressions, say scientists. 
 
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 US forward Abby Wambach shows a smile to the crowd after the team's international friendly soccer match against China in New Orleans, Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. Wambach retired from international competition after the game. 
 
 Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Judy Garland all sang about it. 
 
 "When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you," they crooned. But these famous singers may not have known that those lyrics were backed up by science. 
 
 A smile on another person's face actually triggers a smile on yours too, according to a new review paper published Thursday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 
 
 If someone smiles at you, without even knowing it, you might smile back. What's happening, researchers say, is that your brain automatically tells your facial muscles to mimic the other person's expression. And this could help you understand how the other person is feeling. 
 
 "It's kind of like an extreme version of putting yourself in someone else's shoes," study lead author Adrienne Wood tells The Christian Science Monitor. "You're putting yourself in someone else's facial expression." 
 
 How does it work? The feeling of smiling, or frowning, reminds you of past experiences making that same facial expression. You might have smiled because you were happy to see a friend. Mimicking another person's smile reminds you of that happy feeling. 
 
 But you might not even realize this is happening. "It all happens completely below your awareness," Ms. Wood says, "And rapidly, within a few hundred milliseconds." 
 
 If our eyes are working fine, why do we need to feel the expression in our own faces to understand it? 
 
 Facial expressions use 42 different muscles. "They can produce hundreds of combinations," Wood says. "People's facial expressions in every day life tend to be incredibly subtle and fleeting." 
 
 So it might not be so simple as seeing a smile or frown on someone's face. 
 
 Wood likened it to the way other senses work together. For example, she says, most times you see a truck drive by, you also hear it. Both sight and hearing feed into your observation of the truck. So later, when you hear the same sound, you are able to identify it as a truck more easily. 
 
 Ursula Hess, a psychologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, who was not an author of the paper, cautions that there might not be always be a link between facial mimicry and understanding others' emotions in every scenario. It's complex. 
 
 Kevin Ochsner, director of the social cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Columbia University, who was not part of the paper, explains that facial expressions are very dynamic and might not always give clear clues. People may display their emotions differently in different contexts. For example, he says, people may make their faces somber at a funeral, so mimicry might not tell you how people are really feeling. 
 
 "Facial mimicry certainly plays some role, and perhaps a key role, in understanding other people's emotional states," Dr. Ochsner tells the Monitor. But "it may not be sufficient by itself to carry a full understanding of what other people are feeling in every context." 
 
 But it might not be just about your own understanding of others. Dr. Hess, whose own research focuses on the impact on the person initially making the expression rather than the perceiver, adds, "Even if it may not help understanding in all situations, people feel more understood if the other person mimics." And that could help the interaction go more smoothly too. 
 
 So should we go around smiling at everyone to make the world a happier place? 
 
 "Definitely yes," Wood says. Because of emotion contagion – the idea that emotions spread throughout social groups – smiling can alter other people's emotional states. 
 
 But not all contexts are appropriate for smiles, Hess says. "If somebody makes a sexist joke, that is a perfect occasion to look displeased." 
 
 It doesn't have to be all smiles, Wood says. "If you're trying to get people to feel a certain way, just make the expression yourself and it will probably spread to them – unless you're their enemy, in which case your smile means something very different to them."
– If you're subscribing to the old adage of "grin and bear it" to mask negative emotions, you're not doing yourself any favors—we're simply not that easily fooled. Researchers say that over time, fake smiling can actually cause people to associate smiling with feeling unhappy, and that people should instead perhaps forgo a smile until whatever negative emotion they're feeling is resolved, reports Live Science. "Smiling by itself does not increase happiness or well-being," one of the researchers writes in the Daily Mail. For the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers conducted three experiments in which they asked people a range of questions, including how happy they are with their lives, how much they smiled that day, whether they thought people more often smile to feel good or to try to feel good, and in which scenarios they recall smiling from happiness. They concluded that those who smile when happy often feel better as a result, while those who smile when they're not happy often feel worse. (Meanwhile, check out five stars whose perfect smiles are fake.)