The Definitive Book of Body Language (12 page)

In the enjoyment smile, not only are the lip corners pulled up, but the muscles around the eyes are contracted, while nonenjoyment smiles involve just the smiling lips.

Which smile is fake?
False smiles pull back only the mouth, real smiles pull
back both the mouth and eyes

Scientists can distinguish between genuine and fake smiles by using a coding system called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was devised by Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California and Dr. Wallace V. Friesen of the University of Kentucky. Genuine smiles are generated by the unconscious brain, which means they are automatic. When you feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of your brain that processes emotion, making your mouth muscles move, your cheeks rise, your eyes crease up, and your eyebrows dip slightly.

Lines around the eyes can also appear in intense fake smiles and the cheeks may bunch up, making it look as if the eyes are contracting and that the smile is genuine. But there are signs that distinguish these smiles from genuine ones. When a smile
is genuine, the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid—the eye cover fold—moves downward and the ends of the eyebrows dip slightly

Smiling and laughing are universally considered to be signals that show a person is happy We cry at birth, begin smiling at five weeks, and laughing starts between the fourth and fifth months. Babies quickly learn that crying gets our attention— and that smiling keeps us there. Recent research with our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, has shown that smiling serves an even deeper, more primitive purpose.

To show they're aggressive, apes bare their lower fangs, warning that they can bite. Humans do exactly the same thing when they become aggressive, dropping or thrusting forward the lower lip because its main function is as a sheath to conceal the lower teeth. Chimpanzees have two types of smiles: one is an appeasement face, where one chimp shows submission to a dominant other. In this chimp smile—known as a “fear face”— the lower jaw opens to expose the teeth and the corners of the mouth are pulled back and down, and this resembles the human smile.

A primate “fear face” (left) and a primate “play face”

The other is a “play face,” where the teeth are exposed, the corners of the mouth and the eyes are drawn upward, and vocal sounds are made, similar to that of human laughing. In both cases, these smiles are used as submission gestures. The first communicates “I am not a threat because, as you can see, I'm fearful of you” and the other says “I am not a threat because, as you can see, I'm just like a playful child.” This is the same face pulled by a chimpanzee that is anxious or fearful that it may be attacked or injured by others. The zygomatics pull the corners of the mouth back horizontally or downward and the orbicularis eye muscles don't move. And it's the same nervous smile used by a person who steps onto a busy road and almost gets killed by a bus. Because it's a fear reaction, they smile and say, “Gee… I almost got killed!”

In humans, smiling serves much the same purpose as with other primates. It tells another person you are nonthreatening and asks them to accept you on a personal level. Lack of smiling explains why many dominant individuals, such as Vladimir Putin, James Cagney, Clint Eastwood, Margaret Thatcher, and Charles Bronson, always seem to look grumpy or aggressive and are rarely seen smiling—they simply don't want to appear in any way submissive.

And research in courtrooms shows that an apology offered with a smile incurs a lesser penalty than an apology without one. So Grandma was right.

Happy, submissive, or about to tear you limb from limb?

The remarkable thing about a smile is that when you give it to someone, it causes them to reciprocate by returning the smile, even when you are both using fake smiles.

Professor Ulf Dimberg at Uppsala University, Sweden, conducted an experiment that revealed how your unconscious mind exerts direct control of your facial muscles. Using equipment that picks up electrical signals from muscle fibers, he measured the facial muscle activity on 120 volunteers while they were exposed to pictures of both happy and angry faces. They were told to make frowning, smiling, or expressionless faces in response to what they saw. Sometimes the face they were told to attempt was the opposite of what they saw— meeting a smile with a frown, or a frown with a smile. The results showed that the volunteers did not have total control over their facial muscles. While it was easy to frown back at a picture of an angry man, it was much more difficult to pull a smile. Even though volunteers were trying consciously to control their natural reactions, the twitching in their facial muscles told a different story—they were
mirroring
the expressions they were seeing, even when they were trying not to.

Professor Ruth Campbell, from University College, London, believes there is a “mirror neuron” in the brain that triggers the part responsible for the recognition of faces and expressions and causes an instant mirroring reaction. In other words, whether we realize it or not, we automatically copy the facial expressions we see.

This is why regular smiling is important to have as a part of your body-language repertoire, even when you don't feel like it, because smiling directly influences other people's attitudes and how they respond to you.

In over thirty years of studying the sales and negotiating process, we have found that smiling at the appropriate time, such as during the opening stages of a negotiating situation where people are sizing each other up, produces a positive response on both sides of the table that gives more successful outcomes and higher sales ratios.

The ability to decode smiles appears to be hardwired into the brain as an aid to survival. Because smiling is essentially a submission signal, ancestral men and women needed to be able to recognize whether an approaching stranger was friendly or aggressive, and those who failed to do this perished.

Do you recognize this actor?

When you look at the above photograph you'll probably identify actor Hugh Grant. When asked to describe his emotions in this shot, most people describe him as relaxed and happy because of his apparent smiling face. When the shot is turned the right way up, you get a completely different view of the emotional attitude conveyed.

We cut and pasted Grant's eyes and smile to produce a horrific-looking face, but as you can see, your brain can even identify a smile when a face is upside down. Not only can it do that, but the brain can separate the smile from every other part of the face. This illustrates the powerful effect a smile has on us.

As we've said, most people can't consciously differentiate between a fake smile and a real one, and most of us are content if someone is simply smiling at us—regardless of whether it's real or false. Because smiling is such a disarming gesture, most people wrongly assume that it's a favorite of liars. Research by Paul Ekman showed that when people deliberately lie, most, especially men, smile
less
than they usually do. Ekman believes this is because liars realize that most people associate smiling with lying so they intentionally decrease their smiles. A liar's smile comes more quickly than a genuine smile and is held much longer, almost as if the liar is wearing a mask.

A false smile often appears stronger on one side of the face
than the other, as both sides of the brain attempt to make it appear genuine. The half of the brain's cortex that specializes in facial expressions is in the right hemisphere and sends signals mainly to the left side of the body. As a result, false facial emotions are more pronounced on the left side of the face than the right. In a real smile, both brain hemispheres instruct each side of the face to act with symmetry.