Rip it up

Ekman’s findings showed that behaving as if you are experiencing an emotion does not just influence how you feel, but also has a direct and powerful effect on your body.

Curious to discover whether this mechanism was ‘hardwired’ into the human psyche, Ekman and his team journeyed across the world and repeated his study with the inhabitants of a remote island in western Indonesia. The results were identical to those found in the West, suggesting that the As If principle is not a product of Western culture, but rather the deep-seated product of our evolutionary past.

Time and again, the research showed that Laird’s results were genuine and that James’s theory was correct. Your behaviour does influence how you feel and so, as a result, it is possible to manufacture emotions at will, as the As If principle (pages 17–20) predicts.