Louis Armstrong sang, "When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you." Romantics everywhere may be surprised to learn tha

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问题     Louis Armstrong sang, "When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you." Romantics everywhere may be surprised to learn that psychological research has proven this sentiment to be true—merely seeing a smile(or a frown, for that matter)will activate the muscles in our face that make that expression, even if we are unaware of it. Now, according to a new study in Psychological Science, simply reading certain words may also have the same effect.
    Psychologists Francesco Foroni from VU University Amsterdam and Gun R. Semin from the University of Utrecht conducted two experiments to see if emotion language has an influence on facial muscle activity. In the first experiment, a group of students read a series of emotion verbs(e.g., "to smile," "to cry")and adjectives(e.g., "funny," "frustrating")on a monitor, while the activity of their zygomatic major(the muscle responsible for smiles)and corrugator supercilii(which causes frowns)muscles were measured. The results showed that reading action verbs activated the corresponding muscles. For example, "to laugh" resulted in activation of the zygomatic major muscle, but did not cause any response in the muscles responsible for frowning. Interestingly, when presented with the emotion adjectives like "funny" or "frustrating" the volunteers demonstrated much lower muscle activation compared to their reactions to emotion verbs. The researchers note that muscle activity is "induced in the reader when reading verbs representing facial expressions of emotion."
    Can this natural bodily reaction affect our judgments? In another experiment, volunteers watched a series of cartoons and were unconsciously shown emotion verbs and adjectives after each one. They were then asked to rate how funny they thought the cartoons were. Half of the participants held a pen with their lips, to prevent them from smiling, while the remaining participants did not have their muscle movement blocked. The results reveal that even when emotion verbs are presented unconsciously, they are able to influence judgment—volunteers found cartoons to be funnier when they were preceded by smiling verbs than if they were preceded by frowning-related verbs. However, this effect only occurred in the volunteers who were able to smile—volunteers who had muscle movement blocked did not show this relationship between emotion verbs and how funny they judged the cartoons as being.
    The results of these experiments reveal that simply reading emotion verbs activates specific facial muscles and can influence judgments we make. The researchers note these findings suggest that "language is not merely symbolic, but also somatic," and they conclude that "these experiments provide an important bridge between research on the neurobiological basis of language and related behavioral research."
Louis Armstrong is cited in first paragraph to

选项 A、provide as a proof that smiles are infectious.
B、introduce the topic to be explored in the text.
C、show merry sentiment usually spreads around.
D、justify the assumption in Psychological Science.

答案B

解析 事实细节题,考查引用细节。第一段开篇引用Louis Armstrong的歌词,然后②句指出心理学研究已经证明歌词中所表达的情感传递确实存在,③句再进一步指出有新研究证明仅仅阅读某些词汇也能产生同样的效果,这是文章的主题,由此可知,引用是为了引出后文的主题,故B项正确。
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