frown or smile — experimenting with cognitive ease

The two portrait-shots above are the visual outcome of an experiment that I felt compelled to carry out as mentioned in the book: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, my current reading. Basically, the two different ways of holding the pencil in my eating-apparatus physically forced me to eather »frown« or to »smile« thereby inducing respectively cognitive strain or ease in a self-reinforced reciprocity.
Our cognitive state, ranging between cognitive ease and cognitive strain depends on a multitude of incoming stimulus and has surprising effects on »the way we see things« and consequently our descisions and our actions.
The pleasure of cognitive ease makes you like what you see, believe what you hear and makes you trust your intuition. At the same time your thinking becomes relatively casual and superficial. Cognitive strain makes you likely to be vigilant and suspicious, feel less comfortable and makes you invest more effort in what you are doing. You are likely to make fewer errors yet it diminishes your creativity and intuition. (this paragraph quotes some of the text in the book)
I felt that my little experiment confirmed some of the above mentioned, that is to the extent that I could consciously feel the cognitive difference reflecting the given physical constraint. My conclusion is that I will smile more (than already;) to fully benefit from the pleasures of cognitive ease.