December 3, 2013 • 30 mins
The Science of Smiles: Just try to resist the power of the human smile. We dare you! In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie explore the science behind all those upside-down frowns. Be sure to check out the accompanying image gallery by clicking here. (Photo by Adrianna Williams/Digital Vision/Getty)
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome stuff to bow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Degrass. Julie
a smiley person. Would you would you say that you
are smile prone? M. I don't think of myself that's
just a smily person. In fact, you and I were
(00:24):
talking about smiling a little earlier, and I typically have
sort of a frowny face even though I'm not frowning.
You just have turned down lips. So I guess others
think of me as a frowny face. What about you? Um,
I'm guess I'm not opposed to smiling. I'm not a
smile I do smile. UM, but I feel like my
(00:46):
relationship with smiles is kind of weird, Like, on one,
on one hand, there's there's always this I feel like
there's this temptation in especially the United States, UH, bombarded
as we are with perfect smiles in our TV actors
and especially in our big Hollywood actors and in all
of our advertisements, that you tend to be a little
(01:07):
more self conscious about your teeth. Uh if you don't
have that perfect grin which can can often make you
a little more tight lipped in your smiling and a
little more reserved in your flashing of your smile, which
is something to take take with us. Take that idea
with us as we we go into this this topic today,
because I was recently reading in an interview excerpt with
(01:27):
Ricky Gervei and he was talking, he was getting into
the whole teeth and of course it's the old trope
of uh, you know, British teeth versus American teeth, and
and and what he was finding and what I've found
before too, is that in the US again, there's that
huge emphasis on the perfect smile, and in Brittain things
are a little more relaxed and normal. You can watch
a TV show there and you'll see people with teeth
(01:50):
that are refreshingly normal teeth. You'll see like a gap
in somebody's teeth, and you'll you'll it'll at first it's
an American view where you're like, oh, well that's interesting.
Then you feel a little more uh related to the
character because this person seems a little more real. Um.
So take all of that with you into into this
topic as we discuss smiles. The science of smiles, What
(02:10):
smiles are really doing, because, as is often pointed out,
a smile is not just this thing floating in the air.
It's not like the cheshire cat. It's something that's attached
to our body. It's it's right up here on our face.
And our faith is the communications array for the organism. Yeah,
and the smile. There's so much more to the smile
than you would think. So we're going to dive into that. Uh.
This is a statistic that is thrown around a lot
(02:32):
that kids smile four hundred times a day and US
adults on average smile only twenty times a day. Okay,
well that makes sense because I feel like with children,
especially the very young children, it's all just a pendulum
between you know, absolute care and unhappiness and just just
and then just unbridled happiness on the other end. So
(02:52):
you know, they're swinging into the pendle, and they're also
crying more d in the course of the day. They're
also feeling heartbroken more during the course of the day.
And humans have a lot more um humans adults. I
keep making that mistake in conversations. Uh, Us, adult humans
have a lot more nuance in the way that we
react emotionally. To the world. Well, a lot of it
too is mimicking your environment and learning these social cues.
(03:15):
And we'll talk more about this in terms of mirror
neurons in a second, but I did want to point
out that babies actually smile in the womb, and previous
to four D scanners, which produced three D images that
move in real time, it was thought that babies smiled
only after learning the behavior about six weeks after they
were born. But it was Dr Stewart Campbell who was
(03:36):
the first to capture these images of baby smiling in
the womb, and his idea for this lag of after
they're born, this six week lag of smiling, is that
in the womb, it's safe, it's warm, so you're able
to leisurely float about without a worry and perhaps smile. Yeah,
of course you'd smile on that right, right, Sure, But
(03:58):
he's saying that once you're born, you know, all of
a sudden, you're just bombarded with all the stimuli, and
so that's a smile and relaxation is sort of the
furthest things from a child or baby's mind at that point.
And that made me think about when we've talked about
children's brains in particular babies being soaked in neurotransmitters which
are faring around all the data that they're taking in.
(04:19):
And that makes sense to me, you know, because that
first six weeks it's just trying to make sense of
all these different sensations. So smile is going to have
to wait, you know. On the subject of smiles, also
found some stats about the world smiles UH, and that
this particular starters looking at found that countries in East
Asia Japan and Southeast Asia Thailand, of the Philippines, this
(04:43):
is where you would find the most smiles per capita
um and then UH, where as if you looked at
Northern European countries, Scandinavian countries, in the Eastern Bloc countries,
you would see considerably a less, not like the least
smiles per capita in those areas. That's interesting because I
was recently at a with a party for a kid
and there was a large contingent of German parents there,
(05:05):
and I noticed that in the conversations that I had
with the parents that um, you know, you begin to
notice your own behavior in this group situation, that I
was doing the smiling head nodding thing a lot more
than the German parents were, because I think that for
me socialized in America, that's a cue for I'm listening
to you, I'm agreeing, I'm encouraging you. Yes, yeah, that
(05:29):
little voice that comes on your head, it says all right,
grinn and not grinn and not. They just convey that
you you were listening and you were in some on
some level agreeing with what they're saying, even if you
are just completely tuning up. Okay, so when I'm grinning
and nodding, let's take a closer look at what is
actually going on. Is it sort of like a smile
one oh one when it comes to our brains and
our muscles. So if you see something that pleases you,
(05:52):
you have these neuronal signals that travel from the cortex
of your brain to the brain stem. Now, the brain
stom is the most primitive part of our brain. Right
from there, the cranial muscles carry the signal further towards
the smiling muscles in your face, in particular something called
the zygo madocus major muscles, and that draws up the
corners of your mouth. So once they contract, a positive
(06:13):
feedback loop goes back to the brain and reinforces this
feeling of joy or pleasure or whatever it is that
has made you smile. Now we have a lot more
insight into a true blue smile. This is the crinkling
of the eyes kind of smile. Because of someone named
m A. Bungamin Douchen is called the douch smile. I'm
(06:36):
glad you tackled Sin's name because I was puzzling over
that one. I slaughtered his his first name, for sure,
but Dushan, I think, you know, not too bad. But
he did experiments where he would actually zap single muscles
all over the face with electrodes to try to figure
out all these different expressions and emotions that we show.
And that's how he came to figure out that there's
(06:57):
a true blue smile that you see. Yeah, one of
the sixty different expressions that he u electrocuted into place
and then photographed. And actually, if you go to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com, uh, you will see
that we have uploaded a gallery if some of these images,
not all sixty because I think that would just be
a bit much, but some of these images so you
can see what we're talking about, because they're brilliant. There's
(07:17):
this one older gentleman that is the test subject in
most of these photos, and it's uh at once hilarious
and horrifying to see his face contorted the electricity into
these different emotional states because his hair is all kind
of mussed up anyway, so you know, he's got this
terrifying smile spreading over his face, and his hair just
(07:40):
kind of looks like it's a bit on end uh
and then you you know, you see the electrodes. Uh. So, yes,
it's very interesting stuff. But that's how to Shan figured
out what this smile, this true blue smile was, because
again it's the zygomatic major muscle that's turning up the lips.
But also you have this orbicularious oculi muscle and that
(08:00):
raises the cheeks informs those cross feet around the eyes.
I think everybody kind of knows what that looks like,
right you have an idea in your head right now.
I always think about my grandmother, you know, and her
very sweet and joyous smiles and what that looks like. Yeah,
and then the the eventual smile lines that you hear
about in people's faces. Yeah, they say, oh, don't don't
laugh too much, because then you'll have smile lines when
(08:22):
you get older. So there's this idea that you see
something it pleases you. But there's also the idea that
you're talking to someone, they're smiling at you, and what
do you do? You smile back? Yeah, you know, I
feel like I encountered that version of smiling more than
like spontaneous by myself smiling. Because if I'm by myself
and I'm reading something that I'm enjoying, I mean, occasionally
(08:43):
i may laugh out loud, but for the most part,
I'm I'm probably not smiling. I'm thinking maybe I should,
I should experiment on myself with a camera or something.
But and smiling really creepily you're right now, just to
see you feel smile, that's kind of creepy smile. That
seems like now it's a creepy smile. Well, the thing,
this is what I think is interesting about when you
smile at a person who's smiling back at you. It's
(09:04):
because those neurons that fire both when we observe and
when we take parton in action, those are called mirror neurons.
So when we smile, mirror neurons simulate our own smiling.
So on one level, you can't not smile. Yeah, it's
it's an innate in state to imitate each other. We
see that smile, and then the smile forms in our
own face. Uh. It's uh, you know, ties into a
(09:27):
synchronicity of our body, our actions, even when we speak
to each other. Um, you know, like the whole the
old idea that you know you're you're someone who's grown
up in the South and you don't really talk with
the Southern accident until you're pulled over by a Southern cop,
and then your boice becomes a little Suddenly there are
all these Southern inflections that you thought you had abandoned
or outgrown. Um. I find myself doing that a lot.
(09:49):
Not not being pulled over by Southern cops all the time,
but I'll be I'll be talking to somebody and I'll
fall into some of their speech patterns, and and then
I'll start freaking out, thinking, oh my goodness, they think
some sort of a complete nut who's only able to
communicate with people by mimicking the person he's communicating with. Well,
I think it's just showing that you're getting the person
(10:09):
you're trying to connect with them. Yeah, I mean, that's
that's what the research here shows is that I'm not crazy.
It shows that this is part of our normal interactions
with people, that when we engage with someone in conversation,
we make eye contact and we have to go and
sync with each other. It's kind of a almost kind
of a Star Trek mind meld that's happening, except in
a very real sense. That's that's more amazing than any fantasy. Well,
(10:33):
I think it points back to you, this exquisite external
stimuli machine that we have within us. And Charles Darwin
he actually said, you know, I mean, besides you know,
being known for evolution in biology, he was actually one
of the early experimental psychologists. And he thought, you know,
maybe these facial expressions don't come from within. Maybe they
(10:54):
are external to us. So it's not just us broadcasting
our mental state of mind. And he thought, maybe these
expressions can determine your mental state. So this is something
we now know as facial feedback hypothesis. And he wrote
the nineteen or excuse me, the eighteen seventy two book
The Expression of Emotions and Man and Animals, which came
(11:15):
to that conclusion that the universality of facial expressions owed
to the evolutionary origin of it. So this all turns
out to be pretty spot on, and there are a
lot of studies that support that. And one of probably
the most well known studies, there's several variations on this,
is a study of pencils stuck in the mouth, in
(11:39):
which the person has to then evaluate fake smiles versus
real smiles. Yes, and I challenge anyone who's listening and
not driving a car or doing anything remotely dangerous, uh,
that has a pencil around a clean pencil. Uh. You know,
if that pencil has germs on it, that's your your
own business. But if you put that pencil and hold
(11:59):
it between your teeth, try to smile, and you will
find that you're smiling abilities are somewhat hindered actually too.
And if you take that that pencil and you put
it uh in a vertical position so that it's just
under your lip, that will actually form a frown, which
(12:19):
you know, again that's a different pencil studying. Many variations
on this, but the one I'm thinking about was conducted
by social psychologist Pold Nightenthal and it was a mimicking study. Again,
it was this idea that Darwin was saying, Hey, it's
not necessarily internal. It can come externally. And so she
had one group of participants asked to look at these
photos of people smiling and determine whether or not it
(12:41):
was real or fake and hold that pencil in their mouth,
and then the other group was asked to identify real
and fake smiles, but they didn't have the pencil in
their mouth. Well, okay, of course, it turned out that
the people who had the pencil in their mouth had
a harder time identifying the true blue smiles because that
whole mechanism of their rare neurons and their ability to
mimic that smile was interrupted. So the ability to mimic
(13:05):
the smile influences our power to understand them and our
power to feel that emotion. So they didn't get the
emotional lift that their counterparts, who were not hindered and
could identify a real smile got when they looked at
that true blue smile. It's another uh, all this information
is just another great argument for that mind body connection
(13:26):
that we've talked about again again. They had the idea
that we're not this brain that's sealed up in this
body suit. We are and we're not this rider on
this horse where a centaur where this uh, this can
joint being of brain and body and uh and to
the you know the quote that I mentioned earlier, which
actually came from Paula Needenthal, were not these uh these
magic chess our cat grins who are just floating in
(13:47):
the middle of space. That that grin is attached to
our body. That's a part of our body, and it's
it's part of this facial communication system that we have. Yeah,
it's telling your brain something about the world and how
you should feel. All right, let's take a quick break
and when we get back, when you're talking about smiles, happiness,
life expectancy, and chopsticks. All right, we are back. Does
(14:15):
flashing a grin make you happier? It's the question, and
could you live longer? Yes, because that's the big question
that sort of arises out of what we've discussed so far. Um,
we've talked about the way that it is the smiles
are as part of our communications array. It's a part
of our means of communing with other individuals who were
talking to about sharing things that are smile worthy. So
(14:38):
to what extent does it have a positive impact on
longevity and just sort of mental health? In general, especially
when you consider that smiling um in studies has shown
to reduce courses all levels of stress hormone levels and
increase endorphins that feel good hormone HW. Can you study
this right? Well? One way, of course is to look
(14:59):
at older pick ars of somebody, particularly pictures in say
a yearbook or baseball card photos. Both of these factor
into a couple of different studies that we're about to discuss.
As far as the yearbook goes, researchers at De Paul
University in Greencastle, Indiana analyzed the college yearbook photos of
six hundred and fifty five alumni and ranked the smiles
and those photographs in the scale of two which is
(15:19):
your complete gloomy, gus angsty teenager smile to a full tin,
which is your complete electrodes attached to the face, grim
beaming from ear to ear smile. And the participants in
these studies were also asked a series of questions about
their relationships, that status, their divorce history, and UH, and
the non smilers were actually more likely, it turned out
to be divorced, and the people who smiled at the most.
(15:40):
Now then they also did some follow up on this
right UH, they performed a second round of smile rankings,
this time recruiting sixty one adults fifty five years older
who are willing to hand over a handful of photographs
from when they were ages five to twenty two, and
once again, the people who smiled the most in their
photographs were least likely to be divorced. Okay and the
University of California, Berkeley, they also studied as a thirty
(16:03):
year longitudinal study of yearbook photos of women who had
the best, you know, truest smiles, and they found the
same sort of thing that after a thirty year study
of those people who had those true blue smiles, that
women who smiled the most and those photos had the
happier lives, happier marriages, and fewer setbacks, which leads me
(16:25):
to the baseball cards study, which is very similar. This
is a Wayne State University research project examining the baseball
card photos of major league players in nineteen fifty two,
and players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an
average of only seventy two point nine years, while players
with beaming smiles they lived in average of seventy nine
(16:46):
point nine years. So with this data suggests is that
smiling increased life expectancy. Now, some people will look at
these studies and say, okay, yeah, but in terms of
cultural responses to smiling, men are sometimes not encouraged smile.
So perhaps that person was happy, but they just didn't smile.
Or perhaps the person smiling was thinking about something that
(17:08):
really sort of made them feel warm and fuzzing on
the inside. Maybe they were thinking about their children, and
so at that very moment they got a picture of
what that person's frame of mind was, but that wasn't
necessarily true for how they conducted the rest of their lives. Yeah,
I mean, there's plenty of room to pick this apart,
you know, Stanley, there because there are a lot of
people who were significantly happier after they got out of
(17:30):
high school. For instance, there are a lot of people
who for whom everything after high school was just a
backward gaze to the brilliance that was their senior year.
I mean, and then when you start to your point,
when you start looking about the differences internationally and culturally, um,
you know, how would the study have looked if it
had it been conducted in Thailand? How would it look
had it been conducted in Scandinavian country. So one say
(17:53):
that that's far harder to pick apart. Has to do
with stress and chopsticks. Yes, Now, unlike the pencil scenario
where you stick a pencil in your mouth and suddenly
you're you're inhibited from smiling, you can, of course take
two chopsticks and you can force a smile. Um, I've
never done that. Was this a thing? Is this like
(18:14):
a horsing around with chopsticks kind of gag? Or is
this just something that thought up of the experiment. I
think it was just for the experiment because what they
could do with these chopsticks is they could manipulate more muscles.
We were talking about hundred sixty nine participants who muscles
were manipulated with chopsticks into a neutral expression, a standard
(18:35):
smile or a doc in smile. Because that way they
could test all these different stress reactions against those mimicking
neuronal signals that were going up to the brain. Right, So,
in addition to the chopstick placement, some were explicitly instructed
to smile. Then, of course this is where the stress
comes in. They were subjected to a series of stress
(18:58):
inducing multitasking activities which they struggle to perform, of course,
because they have chopsticks in their face while continuing to
hold the chopsticks um, and the subjects heart rates and
self reported stress levels were monitored throughout, So those who
were instructed to smile recovered from these stressful activities with
lower heart rates than those who held neutral expressions, and
(19:21):
those with duchene smiles were the most relaxed of all,
with the most positive effects. And those with four smiles
held only by the chopsticks also reported more positive feelings
than those who didn't smile at all. So, I mean,
the big story here is that um neutral expressions, they
have more stress or that they seem to uh not
be able to weather this multitasking with the lower heart rates, right,
(19:46):
But those with that true blue smile, that duchene smile,
they have sailed away on this and even the fake
smiles actually had a positive influence. And that's really telling
as well and interesting because you tend to think of
the fake smile like when you encounter like that genuine
fake smile on somebody's face, uh, you you often think you're, like,
(20:08):
what kind of monster is on the other side of it?
What kind of just complete emotional blank slate, am I
actually having a conversation with And in reality, here's this
person who's I mean, they're wearing the mask, but the
mask is wearing them, you know, I know. It's just
thinking about two examples of that. One is the beauty
queen smile, which can be a terrifying smile also because
(20:28):
you know, there's a large amount of drag, makeup and
gender performance going on. And the second thing is the
mayor from the Nightmare before Christmas? Do you remember this?
He had a frown and he had a smile, and
so it would revolve around depending on you know, who
he was constituent he was talking to. Um. But yeah,
I mean this is this is the interesting thing about
(20:49):
even that terrifying fake smile is going to give you
a little bit of a lift. And here is yet
another study about smiling, and this one has to do
with pain. Um. It turns out at people who frowned
during an unpleasant procedure, they report feeling more pain than
those who do not. This is a study that was
published in the Journal of Pain. And what happened is
(21:10):
that the researchers applied heat to the forums of twenty
nine participants who were asked to either make unhappy, neutral,
or relax faces during the procedure, and lo and behold.
Those who exhibited negative expressions reported being in more pain
than the others. That reminds me of one of the
yoga classes I used to go to, back when I
got to go to yoga. Would always wait until we
(21:31):
were in some sort of complicated balancing scenario and uh,
and we're all standing out there, no doubt what kind
of strange faces going on, and she would encourage everyone
to smile, Like if you just said, if you're if
you can't smile, you're you're working too hard at it.
And so you you'd force a smile while you know,
wrapped in eagle pose or something, and and it would
(21:52):
have this I feel like it would have the strengthening
effect at least on me, Like I'm suddenly I'm smiling,
and I can actually make it through the pose a
little longer than I'm just setting there kind of uh,
you know, grimly trying to to force myself into this position. Right,
It had a calming effect. And so that's what we
see over and over again in these studies. Grant Embarrett
grant Embarrett Nights, which incidentally, was the title of that
(22:13):
study we're just talking about with the chopsticks, Grin and Barrett,
the influence of manipulated positive facial expression on the stress response.
So we talked about the divide between adults and children
as far as smiles goes. But but how about the
gender divide. Well, if there are any women out there
listening to this, and you've ever had someone tell you
(22:33):
to smile, probably an older gentleman than you. Know what
I'm talking about here in terms of what is sometimes
expected of women, that they're going to be friendly, that
they're going to smile, And so you tend to think
of women smiling more, and you often see studies that
say that women do. But then you have someone named
Marianne la France. She is a professor of psychology at Yale,
(22:55):
and she says that wide cultural, ethnic, and other differences
suggest that the sex difference is not something that is hardwired,
so it's not a function of being male or female,
but that there's a cultural overlay that sort of tells
he tells us about these rules about smiling, and she did.
She and co authors Elizabeth Pallack of Fale and Marvin
(23:17):
Heck examined hundred and eighty six research reports about smiling
and gender and came up with some very interesting information. First,
they found that women do smile more than them but
the difference is really modest. Yes. And she also found
that when when occupying similar work and social status, the
gender differences in the rate of smiling tends to disappear. So, yeah,
(23:37):
everyone's working in the same pit or the same office,
then you're gonna see you're not gonna see as much
of this social contract and play that not in the
same way that it would be outside of the workplace. Well,
and in those instances of the playing field is leveled
because they occupy the same position of power, So it's
not necessary for women to put on that thick smile, yeah,
(23:59):
to try to amelior every situation. Um. Another finding was
that the rate at which men and women differ and
how much they smile is greater in the United States
and Canada than other parts of the world like England
and Australia and the US. There's a greater sex difference
among Caucasians in smiling, but this difference virtually disappears among
African Americans, and in terms of age differences, teens show
(24:22):
the largest sex difference in smiling. After that, the sexes
converge on their smile. Right, So that's this idea that
teens are really very preoccupied with gender roles at that
point and performing those gender roles. So perhaps that's why
that is the biggest difference that's seen. So the guys
are given in more to this idea though you need
to be a little more macho and not smile. Yeah,
(24:43):
I'm tough, I'm angsty, I'm very deep man, whereas the
females are more feel more pressure to be that smiley,
happy creature. Yeah. And another finding this was pretty fascinating,
the largest sex differences in smiling a card when men
and women thought they were being observed. So again that's
this idea that, um, you know, if you're being observed,
(25:05):
then you're going to fulfill whatever social role you think
you're supposed to be playing. And you know, perhaps then
that's when you see women smiling more, because that's what
women do in in in the bigger social contract that
we all are sort of signing on too. And as
we talked about the teenager brain before and our we
did a whole episode on that. Check that out in
our archives we talked about just how far more important
(25:27):
the social world is to the teenager because you have
an organism that is has evolved to the point where
it's supposed to be branching off and finding a new
tribe to live in and fit in with, and therefore
it's it's to the to the species side of us,
it is it is literally life and death, even though
social agent in high school it's not life and death.
So um, so you can imagine how this, uh, the
(25:50):
pressure to smile or not to smile would be even
greater in in say high school lunch ron. Well, yes,
especially if you thought that your smile might be rejected,
because we talked about how that the pain was actually
felt more in the teenage brain, and we've talked about
how pain in terms of emotion and physical pain are
both processed by the magdala. So um, yeah, I can
(26:13):
see that. So I think what the spells out to
everybody is you gotta smile. You don't have a choice. Yeah,
you will smile, don't fight it. In fact, you really
should probably be going in the opposite direction, trying to
smile more faking it until you make it, but also
just faking it in general. Um now on the on
the subject of fake smiles, Mary le France we mentioned
(26:33):
earlier um I was reading a Wired dot com interview
with her, and she pointed out that the problem is
that in some situations were just too preoccupied with other
details that we're just not going to notice. You know,
it's like, all right, somebody smiling, they're talking at me, Fine,
you just let it pass. But if you're actually able
to focus in on that grin and it actually becomes
the thing that you're you're thinking about and contemplating, then
(26:55):
you can more often than not see through the fakeness. Well,
and we've talked about micro expressions before, the split second
expressions across the face, and so we we pick up
on those, like you say, if you're really paying attention,
if you're not distracted, so you could have a smile,
but you could also have a WinCE in there. So
it was really important for us to be able to
pick up on those really subtle hints about what someone's feeling,
(27:18):
because a lot of the way that we communicate is
non verbal. So here's a question, should we all have
permanent smiles inscribed on our faces? Because this has apparently
been a trend to some degree in South Korea, with
the individuals getting this, uh, this perma smile etched into
(27:38):
their face kind of kind of a mild like little
just in a little up turn out like a full
on joker face. But that the idea of then you'll
look happier all the time. And really, when you look
at the science, it begins to make a certain sort
of sense. Like if you'd ask me beforehand, hey, would
you want to have a smile inscribed in your face?
I would say no. And I would still say no,
but I would at least now be able to say all.
(28:00):
I wouldn't do it personally, but I can see what
the benefits would be. I don't know. I think that
it would be really confusing in seriously sad situations if
someone was staring back at me with a little smile. Well, yeah,
because to your point, the social contract, and sometimes the
social contract is saying do not smile, do not at
this very moment. Do the opposite of that, please, Yeah,
(28:21):
So if you look at it that way, it would
be a definite problem. You'd really have to be in
the right occupation, like maybe newscaster, like not not like
a full like twenty four our newscaster, but more like
a local newscaster. I think like the good morning you know,
like happy news person. Yeah where even even countering before,
like they're even delivering kind of down news, but they
(28:43):
still keep that smile on their face. They think it's
a little it can be a little creepy because then
we're back in the area. If you're using a smile
when you really shouldn't be, and and it's really skewing
the message you're trying to relate, we'll see that's the
botox problem. Like there are some applications of botox that
actually will inhibit the person to use the muscles to frown.
And you know, by the way those people report being
(29:06):
happier perhaps because they can't frown, but again, you can't
take the social cue off of their face and really
know what they're thinking or responding to. Right, And then
it comes back to what we were talking about earlier.
If if you were to whatever degree you were inhibited
from smiling, you are that inhibit your ability to sync
with someone else's smile to understand the emotions behind behind
(29:27):
their facial situation. All right, So think about that the
next time you engage in a smiling session. With your
fellow human. Do you see the crinkler eyes or is
it just the zygomatic major muscle plan let us know. Yeah,
if you want to get in touch with us, you
can find us in all the normal places. You want
to see that smile gallery we're talking about. Head to
Stuff to Bow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.
(29:48):
That's where we put all the podcast episodes, and I
mean all of them, not just the ones that are
available on iTunes and wherever you go to get it.
We have all of them on the site. You can
also find our blog posts, you can find our videos,
you can find links all of our social accounts, and
you can just go to those social accounts out right.
We are generally going at it on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
We're on Google Plus and hey, we also have that
(30:09):
YouTube channel, Mind Stuff Show, And you can always craft
an email and send it to Blow the Mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome stuff to bow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Degrass. Julie
a smiley person. Would you would you say that you
are smile prone? M. I don't think of myself that's
just a smily person. In fact, you and I were
(00:24):
talking about smiling a little earlier, and I typically have
sort of a frowny face even though I'm not frowning.
You just have turned down lips. So I guess others
think of me as a frowny face. What about you? Um,
I'm guess I'm not opposed to smiling. I'm not a
smile I do smile. UM, but I feel like my
(00:46):
relationship with smiles is kind of weird, Like, on one,
on one hand, there's there's always this I feel like
there's this temptation in especially the United States, UH, bombarded
as we are with perfect smiles in our TV actors
and especially in our big Hollywood actors and in all
of our advertisements, that you tend to be a little
(01:07):
more self conscious about your teeth. Uh if you don't
have that perfect grin which can can often make you
a little more tight lipped in your smiling and a
little more reserved in your flashing of your smile, which
is something to take take with us. Take that idea
with us as we we go into this this topic today,
because I was recently reading in an interview excerpt with
(01:27):
Ricky Gervei and he was talking, he was getting into
the whole teeth and of course it's the old trope
of uh, you know, British teeth versus American teeth, and
and and what he was finding and what I've found
before too, is that in the US again, there's that
huge emphasis on the perfect smile, and in Brittain things
are a little more relaxed and normal. You can watch
a TV show there and you'll see people with teeth
(01:50):
that are refreshingly normal teeth. You'll see like a gap
in somebody's teeth, and you'll you'll it'll at first it's
an American view where you're like, oh, well that's interesting.
Then you feel a little more uh related to the
character because this person seems a little more real. Um.
So take all of that with you into into this
topic as we discuss smiles. The science of smiles, What
(02:10):
smiles are really doing, because, as is often pointed out,
a smile is not just this thing floating in the air.
It's not like the cheshire cat. It's something that's attached
to our body. It's it's right up here on our face.
And our faith is the communications array for the organism. Yeah,
and the smile. There's so much more to the smile
than you would think. So we're going to dive into that. Uh.
This is a statistic that is thrown around a lot
(02:32):
that kids smile four hundred times a day and US
adults on average smile only twenty times a day. Okay,
well that makes sense because I feel like with children,
especially the very young children, it's all just a pendulum
between you know, absolute care and unhappiness and just just
and then just unbridled happiness on the other end. So
(02:52):
you know, they're swinging into the pendle, and they're also
crying more d in the course of the day. They're
also feeling heartbroken more during the course of the day.
And humans have a lot more um humans adults. I
keep making that mistake in conversations. Uh, Us, adult humans
have a lot more nuance in the way that we
react emotionally. To the world. Well, a lot of it
too is mimicking your environment and learning these social cues.
(03:15):
And we'll talk more about this in terms of mirror
neurons in a second, but I did want to point
out that babies actually smile in the womb, and previous
to four D scanners, which produced three D images that
move in real time, it was thought that babies smiled
only after learning the behavior about six weeks after they
were born. But it was Dr Stewart Campbell who was
(03:36):
the first to capture these images of baby smiling in
the womb, and his idea for this lag of after
they're born, this six week lag of smiling, is that
in the womb, it's safe, it's warm, so you're able
to leisurely float about without a worry and perhaps smile. Yeah,
of course you'd smile on that right, right, Sure, But
(03:58):
he's saying that once you're born, you know, all of
a sudden, you're just bombarded with all the stimuli, and
so that's a smile and relaxation is sort of the
furthest things from a child or baby's mind at that point.
And that made me think about when we've talked about
children's brains in particular babies being soaked in neurotransmitters which
are faring around all the data that they're taking in.
(04:19):
And that makes sense to me, you know, because that
first six weeks it's just trying to make sense of
all these different sensations. So smile is going to have
to wait, you know. On the subject of smiles, also
found some stats about the world smiles UH, and that
this particular starters looking at found that countries in East
Asia Japan and Southeast Asia Thailand, of the Philippines, this
(04:43):
is where you would find the most smiles per capita
um and then UH, where as if you looked at
Northern European countries, Scandinavian countries, in the Eastern Bloc countries,
you would see considerably a less, not like the least
smiles per capita in those areas. That's interesting because I
was recently at a with a party for a kid
and there was a large contingent of German parents there,
(05:05):
and I noticed that in the conversations that I had
with the parents that um, you know, you begin to
notice your own behavior in this group situation, that I
was doing the smiling head nodding thing a lot more
than the German parents were, because I think that for
me socialized in America, that's a cue for I'm listening
to you, I'm agreeing, I'm encouraging you. Yes, yeah, that
(05:29):
little voice that comes on your head, it says all right,
grinn and not grinn and not. They just convey that
you you were listening and you were in some on
some level agreeing with what they're saying, even if you
are just completely tuning up. Okay, so when I'm grinning
and nodding, let's take a closer look at what is
actually going on. Is it sort of like a smile
one oh one when it comes to our brains and
our muscles. So if you see something that pleases you,
(05:52):
you have these neuronal signals that travel from the cortex
of your brain to the brain stem. Now, the brain
stom is the most primitive part of our brain. Right
from there, the cranial muscles carry the signal further towards
the smiling muscles in your face, in particular something called
the zygo madocus major muscles, and that draws up the
corners of your mouth. So once they contract, a positive
(06:13):
feedback loop goes back to the brain and reinforces this
feeling of joy or pleasure or whatever it is that
has made you smile. Now we have a lot more
insight into a true blue smile. This is the crinkling
of the eyes kind of smile. Because of someone named
m A. Bungamin Douchen is called the douch smile. I'm
(06:36):
glad you tackled Sin's name because I was puzzling over
that one. I slaughtered his his first name, for sure,
but Dushan, I think, you know, not too bad. But
he did experiments where he would actually zap single muscles
all over the face with electrodes to try to figure
out all these different expressions and emotions that we show.
And that's how he came to figure out that there's
(06:57):
a true blue smile that you see. Yeah, one of
the sixty different expressions that he u electrocuted into place
and then photographed. And actually, if you go to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com, uh, you will see
that we have uploaded a gallery if some of these images,
not all sixty because I think that would just be
a bit much, but some of these images so you
can see what we're talking about, because they're brilliant. There's
(07:17):
this one older gentleman that is the test subject in
most of these photos, and it's uh at once hilarious
and horrifying to see his face contorted the electricity into
these different emotional states because his hair is all kind
of mussed up anyway, so you know, he's got this
terrifying smile spreading over his face, and his hair just
(07:40):
kind of looks like it's a bit on end uh
and then you you know, you see the electrodes. Uh. So, yes,
it's very interesting stuff. But that's how to Shan figured
out what this smile, this true blue smile was, because
again it's the zygomatic major muscle that's turning up the lips.
But also you have this orbicularious oculi muscle and that
(08:00):
raises the cheeks informs those cross feet around the eyes.
I think everybody kind of knows what that looks like,
right you have an idea in your head right now.
I always think about my grandmother, you know, and her
very sweet and joyous smiles and what that looks like. Yeah,
and then the the eventual smile lines that you hear
about in people's faces. Yeah, they say, oh, don't don't
laugh too much, because then you'll have smile lines when
(08:22):
you get older. So there's this idea that you see
something it pleases you. But there's also the idea that
you're talking to someone, they're smiling at you, and what
do you do? You smile back? Yeah, you know, I
feel like I encountered that version of smiling more than
like spontaneous by myself smiling. Because if I'm by myself
and I'm reading something that I'm enjoying, I mean, occasionally
(08:43):
i may laugh out loud, but for the most part,
I'm I'm probably not smiling. I'm thinking maybe I should,
I should experiment on myself with a camera or something.
But and smiling really creepily you're right now, just to
see you feel smile, that's kind of creepy smile. That
seems like now it's a creepy smile. Well, the thing,
this is what I think is interesting about when you
smile at a person who's smiling back at you. It's
(09:04):
because those neurons that fire both when we observe and
when we take parton in action, those are called mirror neurons.
So when we smile, mirror neurons simulate our own smiling.
So on one level, you can't not smile. Yeah, it's
it's an innate in state to imitate each other. We
see that smile, and then the smile forms in our
own face. Uh. It's uh, you know, ties into a
(09:27):
synchronicity of our body, our actions, even when we speak
to each other. Um, you know, like the whole the
old idea that you know you're you're someone who's grown
up in the South and you don't really talk with
the Southern accident until you're pulled over by a Southern cop,
and then your boice becomes a little Suddenly there are
all these Southern inflections that you thought you had abandoned
or outgrown. Um. I find myself doing that a lot.
(09:49):
Not not being pulled over by Southern cops all the time,
but I'll be I'll be talking to somebody and I'll
fall into some of their speech patterns, and and then
I'll start freaking out, thinking, oh my goodness, they think
some sort of a complete nut who's only able to
communicate with people by mimicking the person he's communicating with. Well,
I think it's just showing that you're getting the person
(10:09):
you're trying to connect with them. Yeah, I mean, that's
that's what the research here shows is that I'm not crazy.
It shows that this is part of our normal interactions
with people, that when we engage with someone in conversation,
we make eye contact and we have to go and
sync with each other. It's kind of a almost kind
of a Star Trek mind meld that's happening, except in
a very real sense. That's that's more amazing than any fantasy. Well,
(10:33):
I think it points back to you, this exquisite external
stimuli machine that we have within us. And Charles Darwin
he actually said, you know, I mean, besides you know,
being known for evolution in biology, he was actually one
of the early experimental psychologists. And he thought, you know,
maybe these facial expressions don't come from within. Maybe they
(10:54):
are external to us. So it's not just us broadcasting
our mental state of mind. And he thought, maybe these
expressions can determine your mental state. So this is something
we now know as facial feedback hypothesis. And he wrote
the nineteen or excuse me, the eighteen seventy two book
The Expression of Emotions and Man and Animals, which came
(11:15):
to that conclusion that the universality of facial expressions owed
to the evolutionary origin of it. So this all turns
out to be pretty spot on, and there are a
lot of studies that support that. And one of probably
the most well known studies, there's several variations on this,
is a study of pencils stuck in the mouth, in
(11:39):
which the person has to then evaluate fake smiles versus
real smiles. Yes, and I challenge anyone who's listening and
not driving a car or doing anything remotely dangerous, uh,
that has a pencil around a clean pencil. Uh. You know,
if that pencil has germs on it, that's your your
own business. But if you put that pencil and hold
(11:59):
it between your teeth, try to smile, and you will
find that you're smiling abilities are somewhat hindered actually too.
And if you take that that pencil and you put
it uh in a vertical position so that it's just
under your lip, that will actually form a frown, which
(12:19):
you know, again that's a different pencil studying. Many variations
on this, but the one I'm thinking about was conducted
by social psychologist Pold Nightenthal and it was a mimicking study. Again,
it was this idea that Darwin was saying, Hey, it's
not necessarily internal. It can come externally. And so she
had one group of participants asked to look at these
photos of people smiling and determine whether or not it
(12:41):
was real or fake and hold that pencil in their mouth,
and then the other group was asked to identify real
and fake smiles, but they didn't have the pencil in
their mouth. Well, okay, of course, it turned out that
the people who had the pencil in their mouth had
a harder time identifying the true blue smiles because that
whole mechanism of their rare neurons and their ability to
mimic that smile was interrupted. So the ability to mimic
(13:05):
the smile influences our power to understand them and our
power to feel that emotion. So they didn't get the
emotional lift that their counterparts, who were not hindered and
could identify a real smile got when they looked at
that true blue smile. It's another uh, all this information
is just another great argument for that mind body connection
(13:26):
that we've talked about again again. They had the idea
that we're not this brain that's sealed up in this
body suit. We are and we're not this rider on
this horse where a centaur where this uh, this can
joint being of brain and body and uh and to
the you know the quote that I mentioned earlier, which
actually came from Paula Needenthal, were not these uh these
magic chess our cat grins who are just floating in
(13:47):
the middle of space. That that grin is attached to
our body. That's a part of our body, and it's
it's part of this facial communication system that we have. Yeah,
it's telling your brain something about the world and how
you should feel. All right, let's take a quick break
and when we get back, when you're talking about smiles, happiness,
life expectancy, and chopsticks. All right, we are back. Does
(14:15):
flashing a grin make you happier? It's the question, and
could you live longer? Yes, because that's the big question
that sort of arises out of what we've discussed so far. Um,
we've talked about the way that it is the smiles
are as part of our communications array. It's a part
of our means of communing with other individuals who were
talking to about sharing things that are smile worthy. So
(14:38):
to what extent does it have a positive impact on
longevity and just sort of mental health? In general, especially
when you consider that smiling um in studies has shown
to reduce courses all levels of stress hormone levels and
increase endorphins that feel good hormone HW. Can you study
this right? Well? One way, of course is to look
(14:59):
at older pick ars of somebody, particularly pictures in say
a yearbook or baseball card photos. Both of these factor
into a couple of different studies that we're about to discuss.
As far as the yearbook goes, researchers at De Paul
University in Greencastle, Indiana analyzed the college yearbook photos of
six hundred and fifty five alumni and ranked the smiles
and those photographs in the scale of two which is
(15:19):
your complete gloomy, gus angsty teenager smile to a full tin,
which is your complete electrodes attached to the face, grim
beaming from ear to ear smile. And the participants in
these studies were also asked a series of questions about
their relationships, that status, their divorce history, and UH, and
the non smilers were actually more likely, it turned out
to be divorced, and the people who smiled at the most.
(15:40):
Now then they also did some follow up on this
right UH, they performed a second round of smile rankings,
this time recruiting sixty one adults fifty five years older
who are willing to hand over a handful of photographs
from when they were ages five to twenty two, and
once again, the people who smiled the most in their
photographs were least likely to be divorced. Okay and the
University of California, Berkeley, they also studied as a thirty
(16:03):
year longitudinal study of yearbook photos of women who had
the best, you know, truest smiles, and they found the
same sort of thing that after a thirty year study
of those people who had those true blue smiles, that
women who smiled the most and those photos had the
happier lives, happier marriages, and fewer setbacks, which leads me
(16:25):
to the baseball cards study, which is very similar. This
is a Wayne State University research project examining the baseball
card photos of major league players in nineteen fifty two,
and players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an
average of only seventy two point nine years, while players
with beaming smiles they lived in average of seventy nine
(16:46):
point nine years. So with this data suggests is that
smiling increased life expectancy. Now, some people will look at
these studies and say, okay, yeah, but in terms of
cultural responses to smiling, men are sometimes not encouraged smile.
So perhaps that person was happy, but they just didn't smile.
Or perhaps the person smiling was thinking about something that
(17:08):
really sort of made them feel warm and fuzzing on
the inside. Maybe they were thinking about their children, and
so at that very moment they got a picture of
what that person's frame of mind was, but that wasn't
necessarily true for how they conducted the rest of their lives. Yeah,
I mean, there's plenty of room to pick this apart,
you know, Stanley, there because there are a lot of
people who were significantly happier after they got out of
(17:30):
high school. For instance, there are a lot of people
who for whom everything after high school was just a
backward gaze to the brilliance that was their senior year.
I mean, and then when you start to your point,
when you start looking about the differences internationally and culturally, um,
you know, how would the study have looked if it
had it been conducted in Thailand? How would it look
had it been conducted in Scandinavian country. So one say
(17:53):
that that's far harder to pick apart. Has to do
with stress and chopsticks. Yes, Now, unlike the pencil scenario
where you stick a pencil in your mouth and suddenly
you're you're inhibited from smiling, you can, of course take
two chopsticks and you can force a smile. Um, I've
never done that. Was this a thing? Is this like
(18:14):
a horsing around with chopsticks kind of gag? Or is
this just something that thought up of the experiment. I
think it was just for the experiment because what they
could do with these chopsticks is they could manipulate more muscles.
We were talking about hundred sixty nine participants who muscles
were manipulated with chopsticks into a neutral expression, a standard
(18:35):
smile or a doc in smile. Because that way they
could test all these different stress reactions against those mimicking
neuronal signals that were going up to the brain. Right, So,
in addition to the chopstick placement, some were explicitly instructed
to smile. Then, of course this is where the stress
comes in. They were subjected to a series of stress
(18:58):
inducing multitasking activities which they struggle to perform, of course,
because they have chopsticks in their face while continuing to
hold the chopsticks um, and the subjects heart rates and
self reported stress levels were monitored throughout, So those who
were instructed to smile recovered from these stressful activities with
lower heart rates than those who held neutral expressions, and
(19:21):
those with duchene smiles were the most relaxed of all,
with the most positive effects. And those with four smiles
held only by the chopsticks also reported more positive feelings
than those who didn't smile at all. So, I mean,
the big story here is that um neutral expressions, they
have more stress or that they seem to uh not
be able to weather this multitasking with the lower heart rates, right,
(19:46):
But those with that true blue smile, that duchene smile,
they have sailed away on this and even the fake
smiles actually had a positive influence. And that's really telling
as well and interesting because you tend to think of
the fake smile like when you encounter like that genuine
fake smile on somebody's face, uh, you you often think you're, like,
(20:08):
what kind of monster is on the other side of it?
What kind of just complete emotional blank slate, am I
actually having a conversation with And in reality, here's this
person who's I mean, they're wearing the mask, but the
mask is wearing them, you know, I know. It's just
thinking about two examples of that. One is the beauty
queen smile, which can be a terrifying smile also because
(20:28):
you know, there's a large amount of drag, makeup and
gender performance going on. And the second thing is the
mayor from the Nightmare before Christmas? Do you remember this?
He had a frown and he had a smile, and
so it would revolve around depending on you know, who
he was constituent he was talking to. Um. But yeah,
I mean this is this is the interesting thing about
(20:49):
even that terrifying fake smile is going to give you
a little bit of a lift. And here is yet
another study about smiling, and this one has to do
with pain. Um. It turns out at people who frowned
during an unpleasant procedure, they report feeling more pain than
those who do not. This is a study that was
published in the Journal of Pain. And what happened is
(21:10):
that the researchers applied heat to the forums of twenty
nine participants who were asked to either make unhappy, neutral,
or relax faces during the procedure, and lo and behold.
Those who exhibited negative expressions reported being in more pain
than the others. That reminds me of one of the
yoga classes I used to go to, back when I
got to go to yoga. Would always wait until we
(21:31):
were in some sort of complicated balancing scenario and uh,
and we're all standing out there, no doubt what kind
of strange faces going on, and she would encourage everyone
to smile, Like if you just said, if you're if
you can't smile, you're you're working too hard at it.
And so you you'd force a smile while you know,
wrapped in eagle pose or something, and and it would
(21:52):
have this I feel like it would have the strengthening
effect at least on me, Like I'm suddenly I'm smiling,
and I can actually make it through the pose a
little longer than I'm just setting there kind of uh,
you know, grimly trying to to force myself into this position. Right,
It had a calming effect. And so that's what we
see over and over again in these studies. Grant Embarrett
grant Embarrett Nights, which incidentally, was the title of that
(22:13):
study we're just talking about with the chopsticks, Grin and Barrett,
the influence of manipulated positive facial expression on the stress response.
So we talked about the divide between adults and children
as far as smiles goes. But but how about the
gender divide. Well, if there are any women out there
listening to this, and you've ever had someone tell you
(22:33):
to smile, probably an older gentleman than you. Know what
I'm talking about here in terms of what is sometimes
expected of women, that they're going to be friendly, that
they're going to smile, And so you tend to think
of women smiling more, and you often see studies that
say that women do. But then you have someone named
Marianne la France. She is a professor of psychology at Yale,
(22:55):
and she says that wide cultural, ethnic, and other differences
suggest that the sex difference is not something that is hardwired,
so it's not a function of being male or female,
but that there's a cultural overlay that sort of tells
he tells us about these rules about smiling, and she did.
She and co authors Elizabeth Pallack of Fale and Marvin
(23:17):
Heck examined hundred and eighty six research reports about smiling
and gender and came up with some very interesting information. First,
they found that women do smile more than them but
the difference is really modest. Yes. And she also found
that when when occupying similar work and social status, the
gender differences in the rate of smiling tends to disappear. So, yeah,
(23:37):
everyone's working in the same pit or the same office,
then you're gonna see you're not gonna see as much
of this social contract and play that not in the
same way that it would be outside of the workplace. Well,
and in those instances of the playing field is leveled
because they occupy the same position of power, So it's
not necessary for women to put on that thick smile, yeah,
(23:59):
to try to amelior every situation. Um. Another finding was
that the rate at which men and women differ and
how much they smile is greater in the United States
and Canada than other parts of the world like England
and Australia and the US. There's a greater sex difference
among Caucasians in smiling, but this difference virtually disappears among
African Americans, and in terms of age differences, teens show
(24:22):
the largest sex difference in smiling. After that, the sexes
converge on their smile. Right, So that's this idea that
teens are really very preoccupied with gender roles at that
point and performing those gender roles. So perhaps that's why
that is the biggest difference that's seen. So the guys
are given in more to this idea though you need
to be a little more macho and not smile. Yeah,
(24:43):
I'm tough, I'm angsty, I'm very deep man, whereas the
females are more feel more pressure to be that smiley,
happy creature. Yeah. And another finding this was pretty fascinating,
the largest sex differences in smiling a card when men
and women thought they were being observed. So again that's
this idea that, um, you know, if you're being observed,
(25:05):
then you're going to fulfill whatever social role you think
you're supposed to be playing. And you know, perhaps then
that's when you see women smiling more, because that's what
women do in in in the bigger social contract that
we all are sort of signing on too. And as
we talked about the teenager brain before and our we
did a whole episode on that. Check that out in
our archives we talked about just how far more important
(25:27):
the social world is to the teenager because you have
an organism that is has evolved to the point where
it's supposed to be branching off and finding a new
tribe to live in and fit in with, and therefore
it's it's to the to the species side of us,
it is it is literally life and death, even though
social agent in high school it's not life and death.
So um, so you can imagine how this, uh, the
(25:50):
pressure to smile or not to smile would be even
greater in in say high school lunch ron. Well, yes,
especially if you thought that your smile might be rejected,
because we talked about how that the pain was actually
felt more in the teenage brain, and we've talked about
how pain in terms of emotion and physical pain are
both processed by the magdala. So um, yeah, I can
(26:13):
see that. So I think what the spells out to
everybody is you gotta smile. You don't have a choice. Yeah,
you will smile, don't fight it. In fact, you really
should probably be going in the opposite direction, trying to
smile more faking it until you make it, but also
just faking it in general. Um now on the on
the subject of fake smiles, Mary le France we mentioned
(26:33):
earlier um I was reading a Wired dot com interview
with her, and she pointed out that the problem is
that in some situations were just too preoccupied with other
details that we're just not going to notice. You know,
it's like, all right, somebody smiling, they're talking at me, Fine,
you just let it pass. But if you're actually able
to focus in on that grin and it actually becomes
the thing that you're you're thinking about and contemplating, then
(26:55):
you can more often than not see through the fakeness. Well,
and we've talked about micro expressions before, the split second
expressions across the face, and so we we pick up
on those, like you say, if you're really paying attention,
if you're not distracted, so you could have a smile,
but you could also have a WinCE in there. So
it was really important for us to be able to
pick up on those really subtle hints about what someone's feeling,
(27:18):
because a lot of the way that we communicate is
non verbal. So here's a question, should we all have
permanent smiles inscribed on our faces? Because this has apparently
been a trend to some degree in South Korea, with
the individuals getting this, uh, this perma smile etched into
(27:38):
their face kind of kind of a mild like little
just in a little up turn out like a full
on joker face. But that the idea of then you'll
look happier all the time. And really, when you look
at the science, it begins to make a certain sort
of sense. Like if you'd ask me beforehand, hey, would
you want to have a smile inscribed in your face?
I would say no. And I would still say no,
but I would at least now be able to say all.
(28:00):
I wouldn't do it personally, but I can see what
the benefits would be. I don't know. I think that
it would be really confusing in seriously sad situations if
someone was staring back at me with a little smile. Well, yeah,
because to your point, the social contract, and sometimes the
social contract is saying do not smile, do not at
this very moment. Do the opposite of that, please, Yeah,
(28:21):
So if you look at it that way, it would
be a definite problem. You'd really have to be in
the right occupation, like maybe newscaster, like not not like
a full like twenty four our newscaster, but more like
a local newscaster. I think like the good morning you know,
like happy news person. Yeah where even even countering before,
like they're even delivering kind of down news, but they
(28:43):
still keep that smile on their face. They think it's
a little it can be a little creepy because then
we're back in the area. If you're using a smile
when you really shouldn't be, and and it's really skewing
the message you're trying to relate, we'll see that's the
botox problem. Like there are some applications of botox that
actually will inhibit the person to use the muscles to frown.
And you know, by the way those people report being
(29:06):
happier perhaps because they can't frown, but again, you can't
take the social cue off of their face and really
know what they're thinking or responding to. Right, And then
it comes back to what we were talking about earlier.
If if you were to whatever degree you were inhibited
from smiling, you are that inhibit your ability to sync
with someone else's smile to understand the emotions behind behind
(29:27):
their facial situation. All right, So think about that the
next time you engage in a smiling session. With your
fellow human. Do you see the crinkler eyes or is
it just the zygomatic major muscle plan let us know. Yeah,
if you want to get in touch with us, you
can find us in all the normal places. You want
to see that smile gallery we're talking about. Head to
Stuff to Bow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.
(29:48):
That's where we put all the podcast episodes, and I
mean all of them, not just the ones that are
available on iTunes and wherever you go to get it.
We have all of them on the site. You can
also find our blog posts, you can find our videos,
you can find links all of our social accounts, and
you can just go to those social accounts out right.
We are generally going at it on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
We're on Google Plus and hey, we also have that
(30:09):
YouTube channel, Mind Stuff Show, And you can always craft
an email and send it to Blow the Mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com
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Joe McCormick
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