Parties Involved:University of Minnesota & Carney Landis
Psychology graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Carney Landis, decided to conduct an experiment. He wanted to see if all people have common facial expressions when feeling various emotions. Such as, do we all look the same when happy, sad, or angry? The study, done in 1924, began simple enough. First, Landis had student participants smell ammonia, put their hands into a bucket of frogs, and even watch adult material.
[Image via Evgeny Atamanenko/Shutterstock.com]Then Landis then took things up a notch when he forced the students to decapitate a LIVE rodent. While using mice in lab settings is nothing new, this usually involves testing on the mice themselves. You rarely see them used in such a manner, even in the 1920s. The reason this is one of the most famous studies on humans is that it quite literally proved a point. It found that facial expressions are NOT tied to emotions. In fact, human facial expressions can differ wildly regardless of emotion.