Hostility, smiling and elicited emotional experiences: Considerations for health outcomes.

Resilience is an increasingly invoked theoretical construct to explain why and how people manage to retain their health despite experiencing adversity. Improved vagal tone (higher heart rate variability HRV) is supported in the literature as an indicator of positive cardiovascular health outcomes. Utilizing a measure of HRV as a proxy for health resilience outcomes, historical datasets of healthy undergraduate students were utilized to elucidate the relationship between measured hostility (high and low), evoked emotions (happy and angry) and smiling behaviours to better understand some factors contributing to positive physiological health (i.e., heart rate variability as an indicator of positive health outcomes). Results indicate that smile parameters vary meaningfully as a function of the type of elicited emotion interview participants undergo and as a function of gender and hostility level. However, the smiling behaviour was not predictive of physiological outcomes. --Leaf ii.