Well, the first question that comes to mind here is does that mean you get fake happiness when you fake a certain way of behavior?
It seems to me it's all a matter of how deep you go. Toward the end of the article it says to a certain extent we have control over our personalities. Well who or what has control over the personality?? In any case, I guess what they're talking about is feeling good, but I say being happy implies a bit more than just feeling good. I don't think I can really be happy unless I am being myself, but I can certainly see how even if someone acts differently than how they actually are they may feel good temporarily.
What if you're dealing with someone who is happy being an introvert? I mean frankly everybody is kind of a different distribution of both, but obviously it would just be unnatural for someone who tends to prefer solitude to act like the life of the party all the time. Besides, people tend to know that you are faking it if they are really paying attention, and frankly even when it's real some people don't care for extroverts, so how would the person faking being extroverted feel when they run into people like that? People aren't always happy to see someone who's a happy freak, my guess is they would just see the freakiness of it, especially when it is faked.
Let me ask you this: Would you have a better sex life if you faked orgasms all the time? You would think that if someone can change how they feel by acting a different way then they would see those feelings, good or bad wasn't all that real in the first place, or atleast are transitory at best. The problem is changing your mental (not big on cultivating beliefs either) or physical behavior only goes so far, because behavior only goes so far. Instead of asking what kind of behavior can make you happy, they should be asking what can manifest that behavior - otherwise behavior modification only becomes a type of horizontal movement, and it's all too easy for something else to come along and change it yet again.
What this article talks about is affecting your happiness (or whatever it is they're calling happiness) from the outside in, whereas I think what is deeper is when someone can manifest something from the inside out. Actually, they are also saying it comes from inside out, it just goes back to the question of what is controlling that behavior in the first place? When you go from that place to controlling external behavior (*acting extroverted) and then turn back to some type of emotional happiness, you've basically turned around in a big circle and gone back from the outside to inside, haven't you? I guess that may need to happen if you think being happy involves things looking a certain way. I'm not all that keen on positive affirmations and such, but atleast that addresses things a little more directly through language, rather than kind of going out a ways and coming back in through external behavior. It would seem that maybe the assumption is that happiness depends on how you interact with other people, and I just don't buy that. If anything, I'd say if it depends on an external stimuli then even if you feel happy, that happiness is not 'yours'. This kind of happiness would be just more horizontal movement of one behavior affecting another, and that certainly can't last long.
"I'm good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!" -Stuart Smalley
* edited to add ..
