You Can't Judge A Smile By Its Cover!

Pop and rock stars, smooth crooners, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists all try to explain, analyze, and wax poetic about this beautiful and universal facial feature, but there are so many reasons why people show this most enigmatic of expressions. How and why the emotions express themselves on the face is a white-hot topic in behavioral research, sometimes leaving more questions than answers.  

In 1862, a famous French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, MD, who also advanced electro therapy, noted that there are many reasons why a person smiles, and that there are many ways to smile. But he concluded that there was only one type of smile that was definitely associated with positive emotions. He wrote, “The emotion of frank joy is expressed on the face by the combined contraction of the zygomatic major muscle, and the orbicularis oculi. The first obeys the will, but the second is only put into play by the sweet emotions of the soul.” When the zygomatic major muscles contract to lift the corners of the lips for the general smile, and the pars lateralis portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle contracts to squint the eyes, this is called the “Duchenne marker” and is associated with true happiness or enjoyment.

In 1976, Ekman and Friesen , of the UCSF Medical School, established a Facial Action Coding System (FACS) clinical training system that attempted to reliably measure at least 3,000 visible facial actions. Other coding systems have been made to equate facial responses to emotional states.

Two distinctly different neuronal pathways for facial movements have been discovered and validated, one for voluntary, consciously-attempted smile movements starting from the motor cortex of the brain, and another for involuntary, emotion-based smile movements, which involves subcortical nuclei.

But people around the world may smile for different motives, even when they are embarrassed or angry. This observation probably led Landis, et al in 1924 to call the smile "a misleading and meaningless indicator of any particular inner state or emotion."

It's probably true that no one else knows what truly goes on in another person’s mind.Babies who are taught to smile, giggle, and laugh really are excited and happy. And some youngsters and adults smile for sincere, genuine reasons. Others may smile just to be polite, according to the perceived needs of the particular social interaction. So a smile can be an action or reaction, with situation-specific and cultural-specific considerations involved.

People may smile to mask ulterior motives. Look up Scientific America’s Nov 12, 2012 article, “Psychology Uncovers Sex Appeal of Dark Personalities.” How they use techniques involving the friendly and guard-lowering aspects of the smile to draw people in and get them to connect with the “dark triad’ concept will open your eyes!

This brings us back to the message that the singer Jerry Butler so melodically warned, “You can’t see behind smiling faces!”

May you have many …3D printed, not faking me out, conditionally loved... smiles!