The Science of Smiles

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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

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