Doctors’ Notes: Smiling Special at Hay Festival

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I'm Doctor Chris V T. Welcome to this bit of bonus content. What's it about, Sandy? So we went to the Hay Festival and The Hay On Y Literary Festival. This is where we would normally have doctors notes, the deep dive. I guess it is a deep dive.

But what we thought we'd do for this bit of bonus content is play the entire thing that we recorded so you'll get a sense of the full thing. It's in a big tent. The weather was gorgeous. Am I remembering that right? The weather was gorgeous, wasn't it? Yeah. It was gorgeous. It was hot, in fact. In fact I remember that was a little too hot I was wearing a jumper. We've only got half an hour on radio four, so this is the whole unedited hour of us on stage. The team have made a tiny trend.

I think they might have trimmed it a little bit. It's not completely unedited, but I think you're getting basically the full experience. They took out the swears. We've been to Hay before and we did we did have an accidental swear word because

We were showing a clip of me in hospital and the clip's title was a swear word and when we called up the file I think all the kids in the audience I think to be honest, the kids in the audience were delighted but um the parents probably thought a bit less of us. But you know, I don't No one was too surprised. So this is

Special episode from Hey is about smiling. What really struck me trying to prepare this episode was how hard it is to get the data on smiling'cause you think there are sort of stories that we tell about maybe I don't know if this would be everyone's assumption. But I think generally we think maybe Scandinavians and Russians are a bit less smiley, we think maybe Americans are a bit more smiley. It's very hard to get the data. to be sure. Very hard to be sure.

It turns out you can't trust national stereotypes. That's true. Anyway, you're giving spoilers. We wanna just get on with the app. It's about smiling and I guess the wellness thing here is there's been a lot of messaging that smiling is in some way good for you and it is a thing you should do. And that is what we sought to test in this hour. Lots of people are told to smile. All the time people get told to smile. You're giving spoilers.

Okay, I'm just saying I just want to get people excited about it. Okay, play the app. Here we go. Here you go. Picture the scene. You're at Hay. Uff I always think people are sitting on bales of hay. In my mind,'cause it's called Hay Festival.

Y what I want people to picture is a tent with a hay on the floor, like a kind of charming barnyard thing, and then they're sitting on bales of hay. None of that is true. I don't think there was hay anywhere at the festival. It's just in a place called hay. A's nothing to do with it, is it? Should we play the episode? Normally we say let's open the notes. Let's open the festival programme.

That doesn't feel very festivally. I mean at a festival you just go with it, don't you? What do you say at a festival? What does let's open the notes, there you go.

Thank you. Hello everyone. Welcome to What's Up Docs, Radio 4's health and well-being podcast. I'm Chris Van Tulliken and he is Dr. Zand van Taleken. I'm Chris's identical twin brother. And on WhatsApp Docs, it's It's what's I I mustn't call it WhatsApp Docs. What's up Docs is the podcast? Where we're going to be able to do that

Try to bust through a few of the myths and a few of the confusions, but rather than giving you stuff to do, what I think we're really trying to do is set you free and give you less to worry about. Is that fair, Chris? That's right, Zand. And today, of course, we are broadcasting from the Hey on Why Literary Festival. For those of you listening, we're in Yes! Thank you. That's what we needed.

And if you're listening, I I want you to picture that we are looking out across a very attractive group of smiling smiling faces. And that's crucial because that is what we want to talk about today. Now I think smiling is very important. That's w it's what Zahn wanted to talk about. I was less enthusiastic. So this episode, you know, we each come up with ideas. This is a Zand idea, so we're all gonna have to roll with it for the next hour.

All right, Chris. Well look, smile and the world smiles with you. Now there are all kinds of exciting health aspects to smiling. Smiling is a great way to boost your mood, to improve your health, improve your productivity, to build better relationships and increase your income. How about that, Chris?

I think all of those ideas are promoted essentially by wellness influencers, online gurus, there is no science to any of it, and forcing a smile is not a good way of improving your health or well being. That is my starting position. And now the audience is smiling a lot less. And Professor Alice Roberts is applauding from her seat on the floor. It's m it's making me nervous. That's why we didn't give her a chair. Um

So look, Chris and I both have one-year-olds. Uh they're almost the same age. So for the last year, for a decent portion of the last year, we've had a small person in our households who doesn't know how to smile, isn't able to, hasn't figured it out yet. Um and in fact uh so this is this is Rex here. Everyone says R then you notice the gesture he's making. Yeah. I think it's accidental, but this was Rex's attitude to much of life for the first I'd say first six to eight months.

Have you not seen that picture before? This is for the listeners. It's okay, you don't need to describe it, Chris. He's extending his middle thing. It's a well known gesture. But he's doing it upside down. He's doing it upside down. five year old Sasha calls the F word. It's very funny.

Um so uh and in fact you said Re Rex doesn't smile and I was genuinely worried about Rex not smiling. He smiled so little and my daughter can we see Indigo? Have we got a uh got a picture of Indigo? I don't maybe we don't uh no, that's still Rex. Yeah, we got several pictures I think of Rex not smiling. So I was worried about uh uh

Rex not swanning. I went through the medical literature and became much more worried and then I went on uh various forums, read it was really helpful. There were lots of parents saying they had uh unsmiling babies who've become very smiley, uh older kids, and vice versa. And Rex, as you see, now does smile. So there you go, Chris. You're off to the medical literature to investigate smiling already. Now Rex did figure out how to smile. This is now a much more typical photo of him.

I just don't want a grouchy nephew. I'm not saying that if I'm not saying that if our audience forces smiles that it will make them uh make them happier. I wanna see some rigor. Chris Rigger is my middle name, Gerald. Okay. Rodolph is actually So look look for this podcast about smiling, I did some research. I spoke to some experts. Smiling can change your life.

So by asking questions about smiling, we're gonna probe some of the most important questions there are. Um Chris, I wanna begin with the anatomy of smiling. You're a doctor, talk to us about the anatomy. I'm a doctor and briefly I did teach anatomy. It is a complex It's explicit anatomy too and that is absolutely no guarantee that you know anything.

It evaporates quickly. We have some anatomists in the audience. Um, ten to twelve different muscles are involved in different smiles, but there are a couple of big ones. Okay, there's zygomaticus major, which runs from the zygomatic arch. of your maxilla, which is your cheekbone here, and it runs down just to the corner of your mouth there. And that's the big one that does the really big smile and it pulls up and outwards the corners of the mouth. And then

You have orbicularis oculi, which goes around your eye, and that's the crow's feet, that's the squinty crow's feet one. So when you put those two together. You sort of get a bit of a bit of a smile. Brilliant work Chris. Now that's the first two of the twelve muscles. Come on, let's have the rest. No, you know what, we've only got an hour. We've only got an hour. I won't put him on the spot. When I embarrass Chris, I really embarrassed. Well, there is... No, no, it's not a good thing.

Zaurius, which is the emoji grimace smile. That's the that one. It pulls the mu pulls the the uh the s the mouth outwards much more than upwards. Perfect Chris. I think everyone believes you've got the next the next nine uh to go. We don't need you to prove it. Um so that's the anatomy of a smile and when you contract those muscles, you get a smile and you do that. When you're happy. Yes, when you're happy.

Wrong Chris. So researchers have identified lots of different kinds of smiles. So the first kind is the smiles that Chris is talking about. We've got genuine smiles, or what are called duches smiles. Because they involve your eyes, and those are spontaneous and they're connected to our emotions. Then we've got social or polite smiles, and then we have a third.

category of smile which is a kind of masking smiles. So they could be the smiles of anxiety or pain, nervousness, um or concealment, those kind of things.

Before we get more into the Duchesne and non-Duchesne smiles, anatomy I think is often really only interesting, human anatomy, when you compare it to the anatomy of other species. So I want to bring up to the stage we have a professor of evolutionary biology and science communication at the University of East Anglia. Many of you will recognise him as a broadcaster, Professor Ben Garrard and Jack. Who is Jack, are you gonna get on the stage? Jack, for the listeners, is a small dog. Oh

And he's up on stage. Ben. Ben welcome. Now um if you're listening to the radio and someone's brought a dog on stage, I think it's only fair to tell them what kind of dog Jack is. Um Ben, can you talk to us about what kind of jog just so the listeners can picture him? Absolutely. So he's this I say fifteen to seventeen kilo dog. He's slightly tan coloured, like a scruffy, slightly fat fox, I would say. He's the shape and colour of a very gorgeous large loaf of bread, is that fair?

Fair, yeah. Uh and size and shape. Yeah, absolutely. He's from Africa. He's a street dog, so he's very, very doggy. He's not been dressed up with breeds and and crossbreeds. This is what you get. He is the OG of dogs. This is textbook dogs. Genetic. He might be the best kind of dog. I'd like to think so. Controversial.

We're gonna get in trouble with comments like that. Um Ben, tell us about smiling and dogs,'cause there are lots of uh there are lots of animals that appear to smile. Can dogs actually smile? So very quickly, who here hands up, who's got a dog? Yeah. For the listeners, I I'd say more than half the hands in the room went up. Easily so most of it they're the the most popular animal in the UK, over fifty percent of households have a dog in the UK.

Also give me okay, this time f better for radio, give me a cheer if you know when your dog is happy because of their face. Anyone? You can tell. the two boys up here do, and that we do, but your dog will smile. They'll open their mouth slightly, they will curl their lips back very gently, their eyes will crease, their ears are forward, and you get that sense that your dog is

Smiling. And it's not necessarily just happiness, but it's an appeasement. It's a subordinate smile. It's a I'm okay and you're okay. Let's not kick off. And everything's okay. That's what a smile is in in biology to me. And humans do those kinds of smiles as well. We have broad, joyful Duchenne smiles, but we do also have those appeasement social smiles, don't we? Absolutely. So we're an incredibly social species and

Just because we're smiling at each other, it doesn't mean we're necessarily on the same level and I'm overjoyed to see you both. There might be power dynamics going on there, there might be something that oh r remember that last time I said something slightly awkward? Let's me sh let me show you just how happy I am that Everything's forgotten. So there's a whole bunch of social reasons as to why we smile.

for power dynamics. We'll leave them off the stage, Ben. So tell us about the anatomy of a dog smile. So there's a dog smile which a lot of different stuff is going on, there's ears, but talk about the mouth which

W mouth and eyes, which we think of in human terms, that those are the kind of main organs that do the smiling. You can see there's a wonderful picture on the screen behind us here where the dog has a very relaxed face. The eyes are we're not getting this Duchenne effect where you get the crow's feet. Luckily dogs don't have crow's feet. Um it look quite weird. He or she is squinting. There's a relaxed attitude to the eyes. You can see the ears are relaxed. They're not pulled back.

The mouth is pulled back, but it's not a snarl. You can tell when your dog is pulling its teeth back slightly and it really means something'cause the cat's walked past. There's a difference. So it's the way they're interacting. And we were talking earlier and it's this Snapshot. If you have a snapshot of us doing a facial expression, you can see what's going on in that moment.

But so much of this is in social context. How are you holding your body? How am I angling my body? What is my eye line doing? So a lot of this is taking the dog. whole body behavior, their attitude into context. So when I smile at you because we're quite relaxed, that's great. When something absolutely

terrible is happening, someone's run towards me with a snake throwing at me. It's it's it's still a smile, but it's uh th there's different social situations that elicit very often the same facial expressions in us and animals as well. Now dogs have a very different facial structure to humans. Prolonged. Maxilla. Tell us more about the great apes. So chimps, our closest animal relatives. Do they smile and how do they

How does it look? They do. So a lot of my work, I'm fortunate enough to work and and and have lived right across Africa with gorillas, chimpanzees, a whole bunch of other amazing primates. And you see really quickly this correlation between really social species, highly complex social

community living animals and an increase in facial expressions and complexity there. So we don't see that in solitary, semi-solitary primates in the same way we do with gorillas, and definitely you mentioned chimps there. So with chimps they live in these big communities where Suddenly you have to know not only who you're communicating with, but what those relationships are. You've got to do it nice and quickly, but uh you don't want them any miscommunications. And we see smiling in chim.

Now has anyone, as a primatologist, my mum, my dad, my granny, or my family have bought me birthday cards for decades now with a Smiling chimp on the front. Holding a cup of tea. How about a cup of tea? Oh it's wonderful. It's not wonderful. That's a fear grin. That is not a happy chimpanzee. And I can teach you what a chimp smile looks like. Boys, try with me. You've got to cover your top lip. Oh cover sorry, you use your top lip to cover your teeth.

Rydyn ni'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n. So using your top lip you cover your teeth and expose your bottom teeth. So the young lady on the screen there is a a young chimpanzee, her name is Ellie um she's from Liberia. She's showing her bottom teeth. If you can expose your bottom teeth and hide your top teeth, that's a chimpanzee smile.

So that's a that's a really nice clear picture of a chimpanzee I mean when you when you put them next to each other you can see a big difference. Uh would it be fair to say, Ben, that you've spent so much time with chimpanzees that now when you see a chimpanzee pulling what would look to me like a smile, you read a chimpanzee's emotions the way another chimpanzee would.

Absolutely. And one of the worst things when you go to a zoo and you see all these families and children going, Look at the chimpanzees! Those chimps must be behind that glass going, What is going on? They all look terrified. Chimpanzees are reading our emotions. Absolutely, they're so in tune. Now you mentioned this muzzle, this prognathic maxilla earlier. The reason we're all having this slightly weird gurning look is because we can't fit that facial expression onto our faces.

So it looks as though we've tweaked things slightly. So there is something going on there that we don't smile in the same way that chimps do. A human smile is more closely related to that fear grin in the chimp. If we do a big smile, that's what the chimp will see as a fear grin. Absolutely. Uh have we adapted that fear grin to communicate a different thing?

Completely. So when you see I mean you don't often see closely living members of a community doing the fear grin or even a smile at each other, it's just You live side by side, you're like, all right, mate. Yeah, there we are. You're just very relaxed, like with someone you're very close to. But within a community, if I haven't seen you for a week or a few days.

you'll greet using your facial expressions in a much more exaggerated way. So if I were to greet either of you, I would open my arms, I'd walk towards you, and I would do a big fear grin. And that's to say, I'm very aware the situation could go either way, but I'm showing you that whatever I'm doing, I'm not aggressive. This is not an aggressive face. So I'm saying, look, let's not escalate this. Everything's okay, I promise.

Nothing bad here. And we think it might have twisted or tweaked across the the millennia from that initial I'm slightly wary, I'm slightly fearful, but whatever I am, I'm not aggressive to you. And that's what a a smile is to me. I love this. We wanna come back w we're gonna have you back up, Ben, if you're happy to

The other thing that I thought Ben was so interesting earlier was saying that one of the usefulness of the way that we smile compared to a chimp smile is that we can talk, we can smile while we're talking. So we have much more communicative faces and much richer ways of communicating. Absolutely.

And you have to think about a smile. So you have to think about a smile when you pull your smile up. So it's a it's a very intentional thing and it comes from this sense of this fear grin that is an instantaneous thing, but we have tweaked as I think as you saying there, to adapt our very vocal communication style so we can smile and talk. You walk around going, All right, yeah, it's lovely to see you

It just looks weird. So we're again we're adapting, we're reusing, it's it's upcycling something that's using all those muscles. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we've tweaked that fear grin and now we don't unless you're an evolutionary biologist. necessarily see any weird connotations there. Ben we're gonna get you back on stage in a little bit to talk more about the functions of smiles. But in the meantime, Ben, Garrett, thank you very much indeed for coming on. Did you just wanna say?

It I totally forgotten Jack was here, so I'm gonna it looks like Jac Jack's gonna stay on stage and he can Jack, you know, chip in chip in when you like. Um Nazand, you mentioned Duchenne smiles and non duchesne smiles. Duchenne The French neurologist, the the name that some people may have heard? Duchenne, so we still know Duchenne's name as in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and uh although he wasn't the guy Thomas Willis coins the idea of neurology, coins the phrase

coins the word, um but Duchenne is thought of at least in France as the father of neurology. Um In England we say it's Thomas Willis, but there we go. Um so Duchenne, 19th century French doctor, and he has a battery with probes attached to it, which he calls an appare Volta Electrique. And um he enlists the help of a patient. Um now this is the good old days, the eighteen forties. There are no ethics boards.

And he pulls in a a patient he describes in his own words as an old, toothless man with a thin face, whose features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality. Is there any worse way of describing someone? Well what you're seeing, so we put up a picture of this man now, and what you can see is that he's doing a Duchenne smile. His eyes are involved, his zygomaticus uh muscles are involved, um, because they're being stimulated by Duchenne's battery.

So what Duchenne is doing is showing that we can reproduce recognizable expressions of emotion by stimulating facial muscles and that people are able to interpret these expressions reliably. So Duchesne's idea is that God gave all human beings the instinctive faculty of expressing their sentiments, their emotions by contracting the same muscles. Giving us a language that is universal. So smiles are God's way of giving us a universal language. He called them the gymnastics of the soul.

That's very nice. Are we gonna come back to that idea? Well So Duchesne starts off a long history of smile research where we start to code smiles in all kinds of different ways. Now our s smiles as well as involving different muscles and different parts of our face as well as other body language They're also dynamic, meaning onset time, duration, and offset time are also important in the way that we tr i interpret them.

So to to understand more about this, I went and spoke to Magdalena Rokowska, who's a lecturer in experimental psychology at Queen's University in Belfast. Her expertise is in facial expressions. And as you're gonna hear, she distinguishes between three Different kinds of smile that are morphologically different. They they have different shapes. So we'll hear from Magda.

There's morphological differences or differences in the facial movements between smiles of reward that communicate happiness or joy. They also potentially can make other people happy because they are just so nice to see. There's the affiliative smiles that are shown to signal that we want to be friendly, that we want to build the relationship.

And uh people can also displace dominant smiles in order to put others in their place, show that they are superior, that they have something that others don't have, or just want to appear that way to even like regulate the status with a smile. So the reason we know that is because a lot of Magda's research. So what she did was she took computer generated smiles.

of different shapes and showed them to people and got them to say whether they were reward smiles, so smiles of genuine happiness, affiliative smiles, meaning social smiles, or dominant smiles. And people could reliably separate them out. People agreed on what those were. And then she trained actors To reproduce these smiles, and then she got people to interpret the actors' smiles and found that that was also quite reliable, that people could distinguish between them. So here we have two actors.

Show this is from Magda's paper showing the difference between a reward smile, an affiliative smile, and a dominant smile. D And it's worth j trying to have a go at that reward smile is the really hard one to to to fake, and it's worth having a go and seeing if you can do it. Screw up your eyes. Pull up your Zygomaticus Major.

And see if you can do a big reward smile. And it's actually really hard to do. And this so Magda's, I think, really helpfully putting some of what Ben said into uh human context. That so smiles do seem to have these three big separate social functions. None of which sound is persuading me that forcing a smile is an important part of wellness. It's interesting science, but it's not gonna make us feel better.

Alright Chris. Alright Chris. But I'm gonna get you there. Don't worry. I'm gonna take you all on this journey with me. Our smiles, reflex responses. Or are they culturally determined? So if we learned how to smile from each other, do all soci societies smile in the same way? Or does it depend where you're from and what about the historical, cultural and demographic differences?

Well, we've got some evidence that we haven't always smiled in the same way. So if you go back to the seventeenth century and you look, for example, at Etiquette Manuals, Jean Baptiste de La Salle's Rules of Decorum, And Christian civility, he frowns on smiling in decorous displays of emotion like smiling and laughing. He says he should really try and avoid. Zon, I don't think that tells us anything about how much people were actually smiling though. I mean, how many copies would that have sold?

I mean it's not atomic habits, but it's doing all right. So it tells you. I mean they didn't have hay back in the day, you know, he's he's doing his best. You're absolutely right. And and the typical European peasant isn't reading the etiquette manual or abiding by that. So you can't try and look in other places for smiles. Well if you look in medieval art

You find smiling and grinning, but it's often associated with sort of devil imagery, so it's n it or or sinister imagery. Um and if you look even at early photos, you see far, far fewer smiles than you do today. But there may be explanations for this. It's hard to paint a smile. Dentition in early photos wasn't the best, and maybe you were concealing your missing teeth.

Um and also it's terribly hard the the you've got a a long exposure time on a camera, so maybe you don't want to be grinning for the very long early camera exposure time. So there are reasons why we're not necessarily detecting historical shifts over time. It does feel like we're smileier now when you look at the evolution of paintings. Is there data on that?

That's the trouble, is that if you're looking at smiling in history, you're necessarily looking at these momentary documents of particular individuals. We just don't have a way of capturing smiles. So if we look at Uh high school yearbook photographs, for instance. Um one study looked at uh photographs

Hundred and fifty thousand photographs from nineteen oh five to the twenty tens. Smiles seem to have become more pronounced over that time. Um there was a twenty fifteen research study that looked at another set of yearbook photos and they found that lip curvature has increased with each decade and that women are smiling more than men throughout, which we're gonna come back. All of which may just say we're becoming more cult it's becoming a cultural norm to smile during a photograph. Exactly.

That seems to have arisen, the idea of saying cheese in a photo. We seem to be able to trace that to one newspaper article in a Texas newspaper where an American diplomat said he'd once been told by a politician to say cheese, it gives you a perfect smile, and that kind of spread like wildfire. We we apparently when we were researching this, there is a story that before we used to say cheese, we used to say prunes.

Um I don't know I uh we couldn't ri I this isn't that long ago. Like does anyone remember any of the older people in the room remember saying prunes? We couldn't find Indeed, indeed. Um if you were having a photo taken of you before the nineteen forties, we'd we'd love to know if you said prunes. Um but certainly Kodak and other camera companies, other film companies, uh really embraced the idea of smiling in photos, obviously because it's great.

Okay, so th it's there's some evidence that Scandinavians smile a bit less if you look at profile photos online. Um you've got other anecdotal evidence from things like Russian proverbs, which this Russian proverb that translates roughly as smiling with no reason is a sign of stupidity.

There's a story on there's a story from the BBC about a government leaflet from Norway warning immigrant workers to Norway, um, that you've been in the country too long if you assume that smiling strangers are drunk, insane, or American, alluding to the Norwegians um lack of smiliness. And there's there's some evidence that people who live in low trust societies where there's a lot of corruption

smile less because it makes you look untrustworthy. But it's terribly difficult to get the information. So if you imagine, even today, with all The technology that we have. If you wanted to get a SMILE index for the UK, where would you set up the camera? How would you analyze the data? Would Oxford Street do it? Could you just put one up at a festival? If you had a gadget,

that rather than measuring your step count or your heart rate, could measure your smile count, how how would that change our lives? But we're a long way from inventing that gadget. So we we have incomplete data about this, it's fair to say, Chris. I mean so we there's some evidence maybe we're smiling a bit more, certainly in photos, we don't know where that's coming from. Maybe some countries smile more than others. These may be cultural stereotypes, many of which are wrong.

Bit woolly. Like if you were gonna have a portrait painted of you now, you still might I would want like quite a grand, serious portrait. I don't think I'd be smiling in my portrait. I think that's probably true. You don't gen but yeah, I think I think that's right. What about what about gender difference?

Okay, so I asked uh Magda to talk about gender differences and this is what she said. We definitely have strong gender differences and we live in societies where women are expected to smile and generally people who have less power than others are expected to smile, whether they are feeling happy or not. But the same is not necessarily true for men. Men can smile, but they don't have to, and this pressure on smiling is much uh stronger on women, and probably many of us had experienced this.

societal request or demand f on us to smile. So when we recorded Magda saying this, we talked about it with our team, uh and with the women on our team, many of whom reported that they had experienced a demand from a stranger to smile. And Zand and I I think have never once in our lives No one's ever said. We've never been told to cheer up love. Can we just ask w maybe not the women in the audience, but the men, how many men in the room have ever been demanded to smile by a stranger?

Ben ha okay, so Be Ben Garrard. It seems to be the only man whereas is it amongst the women in the room, is it a more familiar experience to to be told Okay, a lot of maybe I won't it feels uncomfortable to ask for a show of hands, but there was almost a nearly uniform experience from the from the women in the room. So this starts to feel quite important, but Zand what the data so far seem to be arguing is that in happier countries so these Scandinavian countries uh people seem to smile less.

than in countries that are less happy and that people with lower social status, maybe lower in a in a hierarchy, or h more marginalised groups, smile more Cảm ơn các bạn đã theo dõi và hẹn gặp lại.

At the moment I'm feeling like if you forced a smile, it might make you feel like you were lower in a hierarchy, less dominant, and less happy. That's where that's where I feel the data has got to so far. Have you got anything that would persuade us that smiling, forcing a smile could actually have any benefit.

Now look everybody. In order to prepare for this, I did what all middle aged male podcasters do. I did a deep dive into the research. Okay, a deep I'm talking about a serious deep dive. Actually got to the bottom, Chris. Did you? I did. So take a deep breath. And come with me into my investigation. Okay, you ready? Yeah. We are gonna undermine Chris's skepticism very significantly. In twenty eleven A TED talk given by psychologist entrepreneur

quotes a study that seeing a child smile can be as stimulating actually Chris I'm gonna read you the quote. One smile is as stimulating to our brain as eating how many bars of chocolate? Two thousand bars of chocolate. And in fact the same study showed that one smile is equal to receiving up to sixteen thousand pounds sterling in cash. What do you think of that, Chris? What I think of that is... Scott, now I went to the cash machine.

And in this brown paper bag, I had to take a little bit out to bribe the guy at the door. But but now that I'm here, that most of the rest of it's in here. I could offer this to someone in the audience, and that would make them happy. But actually, I can just give them a smile. There you go, Chris. Look at that. Wellness immediately. Oh a s a smile, and look at that. It's as if I'd been showering them with cash.

This was a marketing study commissioned by a computer company, not published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is the absolute lowest level of information. Have you got anything else?

Okay, look, look. Smiling has been linked to longevity and to lower divorce rates. There's a study of the smile intensity of professional baseball players from baseball cards in nineteen fifty two. And that smile intensity, Chris, predicted their longevity. What do you think of that, hmm? We all want a bit of longevity, and all you need to do is a bit of smiling.

get the research notes as well, so I went and looked at this study. In this study on longevity, what they had failed to control for Okay. Okay, all right, all right. People are laughing at my deep dive, but we we're gonna go deeper. We're gonna get to the bottom, okay? Um another study found

Uh th the amount that people smiled in their college yearbook photo was associated with person ma personality measures, better marital and personal well being outcomes twenty to thirty years later, Chris. There's some data for you. Come on. Right. Yes it has. Has it? Well it has been replicated. What they didn't replicate was the the findings. They did they didn't

They didn't get the same result, but but but but hang on hang on I haven't lost them yet, Chris. Don't worry. Um another study also analyzed uh smiles from college yearbook individuals. Uh those that exhibited more intense smiles in the in their photograph.

were less likely to get divorced later in life, Chris. In fact, those who smiled the least compared to the most were five times more likely to get divorced. So Chris, if you want to stay married, either you or Dinah, your wife, had better start smiling a bit more, I'd say. Was this study replicated? Yes! Yes. And did they replicate the findings? No. Have you got anything else?

Okay, hang on, let's we'll do a bit of physiology, okay,'cause I think this this is where the this is where it really Another study looked at smile-like facial expressions, and that what happens is that the positive feelings are caused by increased airflow through the nose, which cools the blood to the brain, much like opening the cooling duct. on a jet engine. I mean, Chris, this is the stuff that wellness podcasts are made of.

This is I think this is the worst study you've cited so far. I'm I'm not gonna even bother to critique it. Even if Smiling does reflect a happy disposition that might be associated with longer life'cause we'cause the happiness science is is is is a little bit more robust than this. You're muddling up cause and effect. You still haven't produced any evidence

That smiling will lead to it. So if I teach my kids to smile in their school photos, it's not gonna make them less likely to get divorced thirty years later. All right Chris. Chris you you forced me into it. I'm now gonna do the big reveal of some real science, okay? Because this this paper made headlines around the world. You may be aware of this bit of work. Uh I've I've I've got graphs, I've got data, I've got p values of uh around naught point nought five, okay?

I had your interest, now I have your attention. Okay. Botox treatment of frown lines, okay, so stopping people frowning, that was associated with a reduction in the depressive symptoms. Okay, so that's quite a big deal. That's a reduction of a clinical score. Meanwhile, Botox treatment of laughter lines led to an increase in depressive scores, suggesting that inhibiting genuine laughter could adversely affect mood. I mean, Chris, that's some actual clinical data from real patients there.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about experimental methods. Were the patients randomized when they Turned up Chris, it's very hard to randomise people. Okay. It's it's that's hard. where that was at a big group of people. Well they ha they had about thirteen people. Well that's that's that's the big Were they blinded to the treatment they had? When you come. Not blind Botox. Okay, I think we can say that this study means absolutely nothing. It gives us no insight whatsoever.

Alright Chris, alright Chris. Can I give you one more study?'Cause I think this is gonna win the room over. Does the study involve pencils? Yes it's Okay, I'm gonna do this one. If you've got a pencil in your in a bag or or with you or a little pen Or a chopstick? Put it in your mouth. I've got one. Well you y you talk about it, I'll do it.

I just want you to get your pen and if you're listening at home, uh Zond has put his pen in his mouth and he's pushed it as far back as he can, so it is holding his face in a in a sort of a smile, I'd say. Um so this was a very famous study published in the eighties. It's called the facial feedback hypothesis. The idea is if you force your face into a smile that it will make you feel happier. So they then the scientists got participants to rate

How funny they found cartoons. Okay, and what they found is those with the pencil in their mouths did find the cartoons funnier. Exactly. And you can see Chris the people who've bothered to put a pen in their mouths are already enjoying the show a bit more. You see, it's cheap, it's safe. This is the kind of wellness I want to use my platform to promote. And you're gonna be selling your Doctor Zahn smile tool. The smile fancy. Two uses. Um Fast forward, that was nineteen eighty.

In bio. Anyway, sorry. Fast forward that was nineteen eighty eight. Fast forward twenty sixteen, there was a huge international effort, a replication attempt involving seventeen independent teams. The reason this is so important is because this was a kind of found foundational theory in psychology. It was in all of the textbooks.

and this idea that by changing your uh physical body you could alter your emotions was a really core bit of cognitive psychology for a long time. Seventeen independent t teams Famous. Famously failed to replicate this finding. Okay, if you put the the teeth the pencil in your teeth and you it forces a smile, you don't have it.

There was then a meta analysis two years later, so now thirty one years after the initial experiment, involving four thousand um people, and again a big global group, and again they failed. to replicate the finding. Putting the pencil in your mouth does not make you feel f happier. Forcing a smile. Pretending to smile has a very small effect, a positive effect, on your emotions while you're doing it. Oh we're losing Jack. Oh that I know I feel a little bit sad. He was making me feel so happy.

I don't know. You you put him off. He's going back to Ben. Um uh so you can alter your emotions very, very slightly by forcing a smile, but it's an almost unmeasurable effect and putting this pen in your teeth really doesn't do it. So this feels to me like we're getting to something a little bit more interesting. that smiles affect how we feel if we just fake them relatively little, but smiles are really important for communicating things to other people.

Exactly, Chris, this is where the story really starts. No Zon, we've completely demolished your starting hypothesis and we are now forty minutes into an hour long. Talk. We've done some useful debunking thanks to me, but we haven't yet got to the point of smiling. So I want to tell you about one more mechanism involved in smiling, which is mirror neurons. Now you may have heard of mirror neurons.

Um mirror neurons are discovered in monkeys in the nineteen nineties and have in fact been studied in humans. Very hard to study neurons i in the brain in living humans, but some people who've had surgery for severe epilepsy have uh had electrodes put in their mirror neurons and and been studied. And these neurons

are ones that fire when you undertake an action and then also fire when you witness someone else undertake that action. So when you smile, certain neurons fire, and then when you see someone else smile, the same neurons fire. And it It seems like it's a terribly complicated system, but there are neurologists who would say that these neurons are implicated in our imagination, in our self awareness, in our consciousness, that these are deeply, deeply involved.

in who we are and how we interact with the world around us. And the existence of mirror neurons and that neurological response to smiling helps explain why smiles are contagious. And it helps explain why smiles give us an emotional understanding that mirror neurons do seem to be connected to our emotions. So Chris, we we've got to a point where we've really got sort of three

three things that we can say. We've evolved a reflex that allows us to express our emotions in an interpretable way to the outside world. We've evolved. Um and and I should say, um, people who are born congenitally blind do still smile. So we know that smiles are not just learned, that they do seem to be a reflex. Um there are studies of Paralympians looking at the the the the winners.

um who are smiling and they smile in the same way. And even social smiles, um and affirmative smiles, that they're slightly different cues if you don't have visual cues, but they do still smile in the same way. People who are born with congenital deafness, um, do still laugh. So these are uh Uh uh genetic uh reflexes that do allow us to express our emotions. We also have very reliable ways of interpreting those emotions.

And so those the and and then we have ways of responding to those and mimicking those emotions. So those three things together lead us to some quite profound questions about what smiling is. And so and it seems to me now we are doing something a bit more interesting. We've got some proper neurology and it also chimes with this idea of plausibility, that we know that when we smile at people and they smile at us, that there is a there is an exchange there. It can

That's that's right. And and and so when you see someone looking when you see people smiling and the the science on this is quite good, it really does alter our opinion of them. So they appear more trustworthy, more likable, more attractive. Um all kinds of positive attributes go with certain kinds of smiles that are that are quite well documented, I think.

Now this is more interesting as a wellness technique to me. Contort your face. And the world smiles with you. If you can sm if you can fake a smile, can you manipulate those people around you, reduce your risk of divorce, increase your income, increase your happiness? This is getting closer to what I think of as the purpose of WhatsApp. Right, Chris. The dream for Chris would be to be able to reap the rewards of being a happy, likable person without actually being Right.

The bad news, Chris, is that smile authenticity is terribly important and we're very good at telling the difference. It's not easy to fake a smile.

That's right, and Zand and I found this out recently when we did have to um I think put on a smile. We uh recently got nominated for a BAFTA. Nominated for a BAFTA. Uh it was uh Oh, yeah. It was our eighth between us, the eighth BAFTA nomination. You go to the dry cleaners, you shine your shoes. Those of you who brush your teeth, if you haven't been nominated A little space on your mantelpiece perhaps.

If you haven't been nominated for a batter, what you may not know is you go to the Royal Festival Hall and the nominees sit on the edge of the aisle, and as the category is announced and they start to read out the names of the nominees, a camera comes up and puts a lens right. In your face. And when the name of the winner is read out, there is then a long period where the winner makes their way down to the stage. It's often a couple of minutes. Presumably enjoyable walk to the station.

It's not interesting to film that. So what they do is they show the faces of the people who didn't win. Which for the eighth time between us was me and Zant. Uh so we anyway, we composed our faces and I We're performers and we wanted to convey our sincere happiness about the people who won. whoever they were And and so I think this was the result and I I think people will be Have we got the picture? Maybe we don't have the picture. Maybe that's just as well. Oh there we go.

oh there we go there we go yeah Yeah. And also congratulations of course to all the happy winners of that evening. Um it's not easy. Uh We are professional performers, so we obviously did it very well. But to find out if you can fake a smile, we went and spoke to an incredible person actually, Shineade Rush. She's an actor, she's the lead acting tutor at Radha the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and she told us about how to how to create a smile when you may not be feeling it.

So Kristen Zan, the next time you're at the BAFTAs and you're on the losing end, I suggest that you use Stanislavski's magic if. So the magic if is I imagine myself in the circumstances of the character. So imagine that the person you're looking at up there who's taking the award.

Yes. So you're looking at yourself winning the award and dreaming into the sensation of what it's like to hold that award in your hands and look out at the audience and see everyone smiling and applauding and thinking this is the best moment of my life. Ha ha ha So great. Why are they laughing? Why are they so insensitive?

Laughing at the prospect of another BAFTA nomination. It's it's a cruel irony of the BAFTAs actually that the people who would be the best at faking the smile are the very ones accepting the award on stage. Meanwhile there we are, gurning in the aisle. Inferior performers are left uh left back pulling the faces.

But I think she does give us a hint of why we enjoy watching either the the BAFTAs or the Olympics or something like that, that we are able, possibly due to these mirror neurons, to experience emotions on behalf of other people. Like i in in a way, uh Shineade's explanation is is both interesting, profound, and useful compared to almost all of the scientific studies that you cited. Well

The the nice thing is that we actually don't have to um believe in the value of those experiments to get something out of this. So we're gonna get Ben and Jack back on stage to understand what these experiments really do tell us because oh maybe we're not gonna get Jack back, but we're gonna get Ben. Jack seems to have lost interest. Um

Ben, can you talk to us then? Because I I think the claim I really would make is that the smiling science is terribly important, terribly interesting, because it tells us about who we are and about where we've come from.

Yeah, absolutely. It's this continuation of this story that's been running for millions of years. So our ancestry takes us back this wonderful convoluted family tree and we are at the end of that so far and as I said before we've inherited these tweaks, these changes, these things that have been going on in different contexts that may have originally served different purposes.

And we've repurposed them, we've jigged them around a little bit. Yawning! So many primates use this yawning, this very exaggerated opening one's mouth to show the large canines that I would rather see your canines rather than feel them On my neck, um so there's uh but then we yawn in different reasons. So but primates use yawning as a dominance hierarchy, they use smiling as an appeasement gesture.

And because we're this wonderfully complex organisation, the very fact I'm looking at right now and I'm assuming most of you in the audience aren't related to w one another I'm having a fair assumption there. Um That's unusual in primates because to have this many individuals alongside each other, I've not heard or seen a single fight in the time apart from you two nearly. Chris and I fight so that other people don't have to. You're doing a grand job. We've seen no canines on any net.

But the fact we're doing that look how much work is going on behind the scenes to make sure those in row three and four aren't having a massive rumble while you two are debating whether we should smile or not. But the reason we're doing that is because we've got all these wonderful little tricks of the trade to allow us to coexist in these Huge complex societies that avoid conflict. And if I happen to brush your knee, we just go, oh I'm terribly sorry, and you smile rather than like and start

Because Ben actually speaks fluent chimpanzee and that was that was quite offensive, so I'm sorry if we c we'll bleep that for the uh for the broadcast. Ben one of the things I've been wondering so we we have this tap smiles are incredibly important. They're very hard to fake. What is the evolutionary value of being unable to fake it? Because intuitively it might.

Feel like you know, my my hypothesis midway through there was going, well if I could fake the smile and manipulate people, that would be great for me. Why are we bad at doing that? Nature hates cheating, and there are so many examples of where cheaters do not prosper. If you see these wonderful geese flying overhead in these skeins, these beautiful V-shaped, there are occasionally geese that get to the front of that line.

And then very quickly go, Oh, I've done my twenty minutes, I'm going to go to the back. Being at the front of the V is hard. Like the pelic a peloton. Yeah, very much so. And you are expected loosely to stay at the front for a certain amount of time. Every so often, an individual goose

and does a few seconds. The moment you notice one doing that, the whole scheme breaks down. Same with penguins. This whole concept of the middle of that group of there will be nice and warm, but we all take turns to go on the edge. If one or two penguins constantly stay in the middle, that's recognized really quickly and the whole communal aspect breaks down.

So nature doesn't like cheating and we do exactly the same with our social dynamics. This idea that if if I think you might be lying, my safety's at risk here. If we're walking up as three big dominant males that we are, and I'm trying to appease you and I think, well actually

This one probably doesn't mean this. It's undermined the whole thing. So it's one of these things we have to invest in what you're saying visually and your behavior I have to assume is true. If not the whole community, the whole dynamic of our altruistic society breaks down. So part of it's about trustworthiness, but can you talk about clarity and communication as well?'Cause that's terribly important.

I I can't miss what you're doing. This n is one of these things where it's a very big visual thing. So you're showing your teeth you're but you're showing me your teeth aren't exposed. You've got them your teeth are together. So you're not about to bite me. your face is relaxed. So there's no ambiguity here. If we're splitting hairs and I can't tell whether you're happy, horny, or hungry

That's gonna end really badly potentially. It could be all three, I don't know. We have to have real clarity when But we have to be certain because in a social situation where you've got primates that are either hunting together or looking for predators or socially cooperating, ambiguity can go completely AWOL really quickly.

I love that insight. Ben, thank you very much indeed for joining us once again. I'll let you get back to Jack. So the case I I'd put to you is that faking a smile, putting a pen in your mouth, any of those things, smiling when you're having a photo deliberately in your yearbook to in reduce your chances of divorce That's not gonna work.

Smiling is a massive reminder to us and all the smiling science of the value of other people. Nowadays we spend more time alone than we used to in pre-history. We're pretty sure that's true, but we are intensely social animals and we have these reflexes. To express our emotions authentically, to recognize authentic emotions in others, and to feel Feel. a facial expression, not just to copy it, but to deeply feel other people's emotions. And that is quite uniquely human and very valuable.

I've come back to going whilst faking a grin or rearranging the muscles of your face isn't going to change your inner emotional landscape. If you can fully embody that with someone else. in the way that Sinead was saying, then you actually really can bring about a bigger change. So we want to finish with a clip of Sinead who's gonna do uh a little exercise with us.

And show that I think that that feedback, that emotional feedback, really can work. It's not easy. You have to work really hard to do it. Uh but perhaps there is actually I'm I'm coming around there may be a wellness takeaway from this. I think that's right. The the psychophysical stuff that has been so difficult to demonstrate in the psychological research, that reductionist stuff.

actually when you go to Rada they do it in a really rich, detailed way and I think I hope you'll find this quite persuasive. So everyone everyone you don't have to join in but um No, it'd be great if you Come on, you do have to join in. How this makes us feel. gonna join in. Hello again, everyone. So we're gonna try a simple exercise, a gesture of expansion.

And let's begin just to open our arms left and right in a big star shape and just feel our bodies opening, expanding, feel the space in the armpit. Our palms, our fingertips, And as we do this, folks, inside we're gonna say a little mantra silently to ourselves. I'm opening, I'm expanding, I'm getting bigger, I'm blossoming, I'm taking up space. Are we smiling? Do we feel light? Do we feel happy? Let's drop the arms but keep the feeling. Keep the feeling of this gesture inside.

How did that go? Are we feeling happy? So until next time, look after yourselves. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you. That is all we have time for this week. Thanks so much for joining us for this live episode of What's Up Docs at Hay Festival with me, Dr. Chris. And me, Dr. Zond Van Tulliken. Subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds, where you'll find episodes on how to improve your sleep, how to keep your breath fresh, how to improve your willpower to name but a few.

And as always, we say thanks to the lovely team at Loftus Media who produced the show. So until then, take care of your And each other. Hi Greg. Hi Greg. I'm Greg Futz and my BBC Radio 4 show Sliced Bread is back to investigate more of your suggested wonderful. And find out if the latest fads read Mm-hmm. For you. Once again. Time I'll be talking to the experts and separating the science fact from the marketing fiction.

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