The Pen That Was Said to Make People Smile
A pen held in the teeth was once said to make cartoons funnier. When seventeen laboratories tried it again, the effect nearly vanished, and the argument moved to why.
In 1988 a study reported that people who held a pen between their teeth, which forces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than people who held it with their lips. Many textbooks concluded that smiling makes people happier. In 2016 seventeen laboratories repeated the procedure with nearly 1,900 participants and found an average difference close to zero. Some researchers therefore concluded that the original result was probably a fluke.
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