 "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. [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. 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. 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. 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. 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. "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. 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. "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.
– 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.)