Richard Wiseman

James’s older brother, Henry, would go on to find fame as a novelist, and his sister, Alice, as a diarist.

William James was a most remarkable man. Born in

First published in 1890, James’s twovolume magnum opus Principles of Psycholog

The notion of behaviour causing emotion suggests that people should be able to create any feeling they desire simply by acting as if they are experiencing that emotion. Or as James famously put it, ‘If you want a quality, act as if you already have it.’ I refer to this simple but powerful proposition as the As If principle (see diagram, opposite

bottled lightning’, and enthusiastically noted: ‘. . . the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness . . . is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there . . . To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind . . .’

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.

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.

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.