a genuine and a fake smile; the key is a muscle above the eye where crow’s feet form, called the orbicularis oculi. Anyone can fake a smile by raising the corners of their mouth and baring their teeth, but if the muscle above the eye remains motionless the smile looks wooden.
Today the world authority on facial expression is Paul Ekman, who uses his expertise to, amongst other things, train police to spot when people are lying. He’s found that a smile is hard to fake because most people can only voluntarily contract one part of the orbicularis oculi – the inner part which tightens the eyelids. Only 10% of people can decide to contract the outer part of the muscle which pulls the eyebrow down at the same time as raising the cheek and pulling up the skin below the eye. Therefore the way to judge whether a smile is genuine is to see whether the cheeks move higher and the eyebrows tip down slightly. You can experiment by standing in front of a mirror faking smiles. Hopefully you will feel so daft that eventually you smile genuinely and then you can see the difference. Ekman’s other clues to spotting a false smile are that it can be asymmetrical, with a timing that isn’t quite right – either just too early or slightly too late. If the person faking the smile is right-handed, the left-hand side of their mouth will tend to move up more.
The authenticity of a smile can reveal the unexpected. In one study women’s smiles were analysed from a college yearbook. Thirty years on the women with the genuinely happy smiles using the muscle around the eye, were more likely to be married and happy. The researchers did rate each woman’s looks in case the smiley women were simply the prettiest and perhaps therefore the most likely to have found partners, but this wasn’t the case.
It’s not only adults who can fake a smile. Paul Ekman discovered that if a stranger approaches a ten-month-old baby, the baby might well smile, but that smile won’t involve the crucial eye muscle, but if their mother approaches them, it does. Although the baby isn’t deliberately faking a smile, at this young age it can already smile politely.
From the age of four or five weeks babies smile at any human face which nods about two feet away from their face. They seem to want to smile, to engage in communication. This helps the baby and parents to develop a strong bond and is one of the first rewards that exhausted new parents receive for all their hard work. Smiles in very young babies used to be dismissed as wind, but using a new scanning technique developed in London, babies have been spotted smiling in the womb. We can’t prove of course that the baby smiling in the womb is expressing joy but perhaps conditions in the womb vary enough for the baby to feel more comfortable on some days than on others. This has blown a hole in the myth that babies only smile through imitation, although it is true that the more you smile at babies, the more they smile back, just as they will copy other expressions like sticking out their tongues. However, they are born with the ability to smile. In the past it was assumed that babies could experience very few feelings – not even pain – hence the absence of anaesthetics for young babies at one time. Now it is accepted that even a very small baby might be feeling happy.
Joanna Hawthorne, a research psychologist at Cambridge University, works with new parents, encouraging them to judge their babies’ states so that they can choose the right moment for interaction – when the baby is alert but neither too hungry nor too full. It may only last a few seconds but this is the time when an adult and a small baby can take turns in smiling. If a baby smiles at us, we take it as a sign that they like us and we smile and behave warmly back and so the cycle continues.
Smiling also appears to play a crucial role in social interaction between adults. There is a rare condition called Moebius syndrome, where a person’s face becomes paralysed, leaving them unable to smile. One consequence is that they can often find it hard to make or keep friends. This suggests that there is an important social element to smiling, as does the fact that however happy people are with their own company, they smile far more when others are present. In an experiment conducted in a bowling alley it was found that after achieving a strike, people beamed more when they turned to face their friends than at that most satisfying of moments when they watched all the triangle of skittles collapse in a heap.
More recently some Spanish researchers took advantage of the location of the 1992 Olympics to watch twenty-two gold medal winners very carefully, including Sally Gunnell. They observed them while waiting to mount the podium, standing on the podium and turning towards the flagpole while their national anthem was played. They found that people smiled more during the second stage, despite presumably feeling happy that they’d won in the other two stages as well. This the researchers took as a demonstration of the fact that people are more likely to smile when they’re in a social situation rather than when they’re just feeling happy. However, it should be remembered that there are social rules prescribing when it is and isn’t acceptable to smile; one moment when Olympic winners are expected to look sombre is during their national anthem.
The mysterious relationship between smiles and joy has been investigated by Paul Ekman in an extraordinary experiment. Without actually telling people to smile, he gave people precise instructions about which muscles to move, and despite being unaware that they were smiling, the physical process of moving those specific muscles into a smile made people feel happier. In a variation on this experiment the psychologist Fritz Strack gave people a pen to hold in their mouth. The instructed action of holding the pen between the teeth without touching the lips mimicked the movement of a smile, but once again the subjects of the experiment were unaware of the expression they were making.
They were given cartoons to watch and rated them as funnier when the pen was in this position than when they were told to suck the pen with their lips closed around it.
The idea is that the facial muscles are so sensitive that they can feed back their position to the brain and somehow lift the smiler’s mood. This is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. It seems that what we previously thought of as the result of an emotion (a smile) can also be the cause. Even posture can change your mood; sitting upright makes you feel happier than when you’re slumped. It isn’t clear exactly how these processes might work and, indeed, the change in mood usually doesn’t last for long. Is it the case that you become aware that you are smiling which makes you feel good or is it purely physiological?
The nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James believed that emotions are caused by our awareness of physical sensations and claimed to have used his own theory to work his way out of depression; the more he smiled, the better he felt. Perhaps it is the case that smiling bravely through your tears can make you feel better, in the same way that looking up at the sky if you feel miserable improves your mood slightly, because it’s a movement you would usually make when you are happy. An extension of this theory might explain why we tend to like smiley people. The more they smile, the more we smile back, which could, in turn, make us feel happier.
an experiment
Try this. Stand up and then move your body as though you are laughing uncontrollably. Bend forward, clutching your sides, with your shoulders shaking. You could even introduce the occasional knee-slap. Now try to remember exactly what this feels like physically within your body. Then stand up straight again and imagine that you’re doubled up with laughter, but this time don’t move, just think of those movements. Don’t think of a funny occasion or a joke. Simply imagine that your body is experiencing uncontrollable laughter and then see how you feel.
This exercise isn’t easy, but Nakia Gordon from Michigan State University succeeded in training people to do just this. After three one-hour training sessions, along with plenty of practice at home, most of the volunteers in her studies were able to lie absolutely still in a brain scanner while imagining either laughing, crying or walking. Each movement resulted in a different pattern of brain activation. This experiment shows that emotions can be linked to bodily movements, something William James had thought so long ago. Moreover the people taking part felt happier after imagining laughter, and sadder after imagining crying, even though they were instructed only to imagine
