Give Yourself and Others a Boost: Smile!

Smiling enhances health, happiness and community. But not all smiles are honest. ; -)

Smiles aren’t just billboards advertising enjoyment. Smiling leads to healthier bodies. Smiling makes you feel better. Smiling enhances your social connections.

Dozens of experiments show that genuine smiling improves physical health. Smiles damp down overactive immune responses, increase pain tolerance, and are associated with greater cardiac fitness and healthier patterns of hormonal release.

Smiling enhances emotional well-being. Genuine smiles help people recover faster from social rejection. Smiling can enhance your motivational state; smiling people work harder towards healthy goals, like exercising more, or eating more nutritious diets.

By the process called facial feedback, the emotion you paste on your face trickles back into your brain and can instill at least a glimmer of the feeling that your face is displaying. When you make a genuine smile, you feel happier. When your face droops in sorrow, you start feeling sad. Facial feedback happens without conscious awareness. Even when subjects don’t know what their faces look like in the moment, their facial expressions engender within them some of the feeling of the emotion on their face. The old advice to “put on a happy face” really works, at least some of the time.

Social benefits of smiling are also well-established. Smiling is contagious. Smiling encourages others to smile. People are more prone to approach a smiling face, and more inclined to cooperate with the smiler. People who come from cultures where there was more heterogeneity and mixing of groups are more prone to smiling than those whose heritage is from isolated tribes with few interactions with strangers.

What’s not to like about smiles? Despite all the good they do, not all smiles are created equal. Researchers are still sorting out what different smiles mean. We often confuse what is conveyed by “genuine” smiles and “polite” smiles. Both consciously and unconsciously, we often make mistakes in interpreting smiles.

In particular, the notion that polite smiles always cover deceit, and genuine smiles convey honesty, needs revision.

Uncovering genuine smiles

Guillaume Duchenne, one of the world’s first neurologists, conducted groundbreaking research in France from the 1830’s through the 1870’s. He pioneered the use of electrodes to stimulate specific muscles in the body and face. He also introduced the use of photographing faces to demonstrate clinical points. Shocking in his day, he applied electrodes directly to the faces of patients to illustrate the contribution of individual muscles to facial expressions.

In Duchenne’s time, many leading scientists were physiognomists, believing that the shape of the face or head revealed one’s character. They downplayed the significance of emotions, viewing them as fleeting movements irrelevant to the underlying features of a face, and incapable of conveying one’s moral disposition.

In contrast, Duchenne focused on the dynamic movements of the face. He referred to facial expression of emotions as the “gymnastics of the soul.” He was among the first to realize that all of the muscles of the face were not open to voluntary control. “Only the soul has the faculty of producing them truly,” he said.

Duchenne observed that a smile expressing true joy or pleasure caused contraction of two different muscles. Contraction of the check muscle, zygomaticus major, raised the corner of the lips. Contraction of the ring of muscle around each eye, orbicular oculi, caused crinkling around the corner of the eye, or crows feet.

But a polite or social smile consisted only of contraction of the zygomaticus major — all lips and no eyes. Most people were incapable of purposefully contracting the eye muscles to voluntarily create a genuine smile.

Social smiles often mask negative emotions, like anger, sadness or disgust. They might convey acknowledgement of, but not necessarily agreement with, another person. While Duchenne smiles tend to draw people in, emotionally and physically, social smiles encourage distance. The social smile may convey that this interaction is not a threat, but pause, assess and really figure out what really might be going on.

Charles Darwin was interested in Duchenne’s work and expanded upon it in his own book on emotional expressions in man and animals. He replicated Duchenne’s insight about the difference between genuine smiles and social smiles. Darwin also noted that the crinkling of the eyes represented an increased intensity of both smiles and of crying faces, a finding that was finally confirmed more than a hundred years later.

Pure joy vs. fake smiles

A century later, Psychologist Paul Ekman explored, built upon, and popularized the observations made by Duchenne and Darwin. Ekman labeled the “genuine” smile the “Duchenne smile,” a name that has stuck.

Three decades ago I had the great fortune to study part-time for two years in Dr. Ekman’s lab. His first claim to fame came from studying emotions in Papua New Guinea tribal societies. Individuals who had never before seen or interacted with Westerners recognized the same facial expressions of emotions, and paired them with the same feeling states. This established that core aspects of emotions were universal and biological in nature, and that emotions were not purely cultural constructs.

In order to rigorously study emotions, Ekman with his colleague, psychologist Wally Friesen, mapped all of the muscles of the face along with the results of their possible contractions. They gathered this information into the Facial Action Coding System to systematically record the components of facial expressions. A half century later, emotion researchers around the world still use this system. It also serves as the basis for most of the computer generated imagery (CGI) that makes animation faces appear more human and lifelike.

Ekman’s work on facial expressions led him to conduct innovative work on lying and deceit. He discovered that during polite smiles many individuals flash micro-expressions of other basic emotions, revealing their actual feelings in the moment. These micro-expressions last fractions of a second, too fast for most observers to consciously register.

Most people do no better than random chance in detecting liars. But people trained to detect micro-expressions improve their ability to detect lying. Our brains can learn to make better use of the emotional information already presented to them.

The division between Duchenne smiles conveying true joy and polite smiles being social contrivances was overly simple from the beginning. For one thing, when including contractions of other facial muscles, people identify more than a dozen other types of faces as smiles.

Furthermore, Ekman’s work showed that about 20% of individuals could voluntarily crinkle their eyes. This meant that they could manufacture the look that conveyed genuine joy. On the other hand, some people claim to have practiced for a decade without being able to learn to control their orbicularis oculi.

Conning you with model behavior

The model Tyra Banks can control her eye crinkling. She recognized the power of “smiling with your eyes” and in 2009 coined the term “smizing” to describe it. Smizing only came into popular use a decade later, when widespread masking during the COVID pandemic inhibited much of our facial communication. (Should we call the cry-faces of infants cryzing?) According to facial feedback theory, voluntarily smizing can then lead to an increased feeling of joy.

The fact that lying can itself be enjoyable further muddles the meaning of smiling. We’re not just talking politicians here. Dubbed “duping delight” some people derive enjoyment from putting one over on one’s audience. So a liar may display a “genuine” Duchenne smile for their ability to con others.

Ehsan Hoque, a computer scientist at the University of Rochester, found evidence of duping delight. He studied the faces of pairs of subjects where one person had to convincingly read a script they knew to be either true or false. The interrogators had to determine whether they were being lied to. Compared to truth tellers, liars gave Duchenne smiles more often, and with more intense raising of the lips.

As in most research on deceit, the interrogators were no better than random chance at identifying lies. But the faces of the interrogators were more likely to register a social smile when they were being lied to. Their own faces were more accurate at assessing the social situation than when they engaged their whole brains!

Some researchers are moving beyond the simple Duchenne/polite divisions of smiles. Psychologist Paula Niedenthal’s group at the University of Wisconsin has found value in sorting smiles by their social significance. People recognize the differences between smiles that convey affiliation, reward, and dominance, and change their behavior accordingly.

Pack a smile wherever you go

We may scoff at those who a century ago thought they could determine a man’s character by the breadth of his brow or the strength of his chin. But we still search for clues about temperament in others’ faces. President Bush claimed after speaking to Prime Minister Putin “I looked the man in the eye….. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

But faces aren’t maps of our morality; they won’t delve into your soul. But faces do convey a lot about emotion. More information than most of us are processing effectively.

I’d love to end this article with a snappy list of ways to help decipher the smiles that grin at you. But human interactions are too diverse and nuanced for that. Furthermore, as a therapist, one of the most common ways people harm and restrict themselves is by concocting stories about what other people’s looks, silences, and actions mean. I believe it’s usually healthier to remain at least somewhat open to alternative interpretations.

So I’ll remind you, that when someone smizes on you, their happiness may be:

• genuine
• play-acting
• triggered because they’ve conned you
• resulting from cultural issues you don’t comprehend
• coming from individual reasons you aren’t aware of.

But even without becoming an instant expert on reading others’ facial expressions, I’ll remind you of the power of your smile, and how it can change your own life, and might influence those around you.

Remember, you carry an emotional first aid kit with you all of the time. It’s more reliable than a cell phone whose battery might die, or a wallet or purse you might leave behind or misplace. Smiling is always an option. If you’re down, dejected, rejected, overwhelmed, grieving, or embarrassed, your temporary relief is right at hand, or actually, at face.

If all you can manage is a polite smile, that may still help create some distance from your negative experience, and provide some respite. But a Duchenne smile will be more powerful in eradicating negative emotion.

If you’re among the majority who can’t voluntarily make their eyes crinkle, finding a way to really laugh at yourself or the situation can help. A pathway I often use is to consider how ridiculous it is, that a simple curling of the lips and creasing of eye lines can change feelings about a horrible situation. But it can! It’s both absurd, and true, like much of life.

Let’s stop giving lip service to the importance of our own facial expressions. All in favor of Duchenne smiles say “Aye/eye”.

If you want to be a happier person, give yourself a smile. If you’re uncertain, but might be open to more human contact, give a polite, affiliative smile. And if you want the world to join you in your happy place, send it a Duchenne smile.