A scene from the movie Mean Girls provides some interesting insight on the way we interact with each other. With a smile, Regina George compliments a fellow classmate and brightens her day. Seconds later, she rolls her eyes and says, “That is the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen.” How was she able to pull off her lie so convincingly?
Through her smile.
Smiling has a long evolution history and is considered an inborn trait, meaning that we’ve developed the ability to smile from the time we were born. There are many reasons we smile and an important one is that it fosters communication between people. Moreover, we tend to smile when we are talking to people because we don’t want to give off the impression that we are unlikeable and hostile. Even though we know it’s impossible to like everyone and for everyone to like us, we generally still try to appear friendly and polite, if not neutral, to avoid getting into any unnecessary confrontations.
Back in the 1800s, French physician Duchenne de Boulogne identified two distinct types of smiles. The first type of smile, called a Duchenne smile, refers to a smile linked to genuine positive emotion and involves contraction of the muscles around the eyes and the muscles that raise the corners of the lips. The other, the Pan Am smile, is a fake smile that involves contraction of only the muscles around the corner of the lips. Sounds relatively straightforward, right?
(Copyright Paul Ekman 2003, “Emotions Revealed,” Owl Books, 2007.)
Current research using neuroimaging techniques have indicated otherwise. A study by Calvo and colleagues (2013) measured the neuronal activity of participants using electroencephalograms (EEG) as they judged whether or not an assortment of faces were genuinely happy. The researchers found that there were no differences in brain activity upon seeing happy faces compared to seeing faces that combined a smile with fearful or neutral eyes. In other words, the brain was unable to differentiate genuine smiles from fake smiles.
In a different study, researchers tracked the eye movements of participants as they viewed images of faces with genuine and fake smiles and found that the majority of viewers fixated their gazes the earliest on the smiling mouth first, regardless of the type of eyes. Participants were also more likely to judge faces with fake smiles as genuine when they fixated on the smiling mouth first before looking at the eyes. The results suggested that the primary fixation on the mouth causes viewers to misinterpret the true emotion behind a face.
So, in conclusion, it is quite difficult to detect the sincerity behind a smiling face. This is how Regina George was able to deceive the poor girl. On the bright side, this means that no one really knows our real thoughts, either.
This really casts a new light on the saying, “Smile at your enemies, it confuses them”, doesn’t it?
By Joanne Shih
