Smiles can ease tension, signal approval and help create a bond with strangers. They can also conceal our true intentions and help us manipulate others.
Smiles, as Marianne LaFrance knows well, are more than a curling of the lips and a crinkling of the eyes. LaFrance, who lives in Guilford, is the author of "Why Smile?: The Science Behind Facial Expressions," (W.W. Norton and Co., $15.95) and a Yale University professor of psychology and of women's, gender and sexuality studies. Her book, originally released as "Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics," discusses why we smile and the various kinds of smiles that exist in our culture.
LaFrance said smiles are one of the biggest ways we interact with others. A genuine smile can signal our heartfelt joy about seeing someone we love or getting unexpected good news, but smiles also can be used as sales tools or to calm a tense situation. "What's interesting is that so much is actually done with smiling," she said.
In particular, LaFrance said, it's interesting to see how people learn to manufacture what's supposed to be a genuine gesture to help bring about a certain result. Even babies, whose smiles are cherished in our society, aren't always genuine in their grins, the book states. Often their smiles are used to build rapport with caregivers. Or they're just a child's attempt to learn facial expressions through mimicking.
And we all know that salespeople, politicians and actors are all masters of the manufactured smile. "People in certain industries know the impact of a smile and spend a lot of time getting smiles just right," LaFrance said. "What's interesting to me is how hard people work at being intentionally sincere. That's what is fascinating about human beings."
She spoke more about her book, which recently came out in paperback, and the complexity of the smile during a recent question-and-answer session.
Q: What led you to write a book on the science of smiling? Why did you think this was a topic that needed more examination?
A: Smiling is one of the most underestimated facial expressions. Researchers, myself included, have studied facial expressions for some time. The assumption has been, almost since Darwin's time, that the smile was simple and straightforward. The more I began to look at it, the more I realized it was much more complicated than people had given it credit for.
Q: The early chapters of your book deal a lot with the different kinds of smiles -- mainly the difference between a "real" smile and a "fake" one. What, in your research, separates a sincere smile from an insincere one?
A: The classic distinction that most people know about is the distinction between the so-called "genuine" smile and a "fake" or "social" smile. A genuine smile doesn't just use the mouth. It uses the mouth and the muscles around eye. But a whole host of other cues are involved as well. One is the timing. Fake smiles tend to snap on the face and go off the face as quickly as they got there. When someone smiles quickly, you have an intuitive sense that something is not right there. (Also), genuine smiles tend to be relatively moderate in intensity. When people have all teeth all the time, that suggests that a smile is not genuine.
Q: You describe smiling as "a social act with consequences." Can you elaborate on that? What kind of consequences can smiling (or the absence thereof) have?
A: Smiles have consequences. They have impact. They have effects. Smiles can create a positive first impression. Smiles can alleviate tension. Take a group of people disagreeing about something and the climate can get a little tense. All it might take is for someone to smile, and the tension loosens. There's an establishing of a clean connection between people that can be done with a smile more cleanly than any other kind of expression. We humans need very quick, efficient ways to signal who we're with and who we're not with. It all can be done with a very quick smile.
Q: In addition to referencing all kinds of research, you also frequently talk about the use of smiles in literature. One famous smile, that gets name-checked early in the book, is that of the Cheshire Cat in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Why does smiling seem to be such an important device for creative artists?
A: It's partly to convey a sense. Novelists and poets and lyricists -- their art lies in being able to quickly get to the heart of what somebody's like. (How someone smiles) says everything. It's just an enormously rich kernel. It says so much more than a long description would convey.
Q: What are you hoping people will take away from this book?
A: I think partly that smiling is just really interesting. It has all these colors and variations. (Part of my goal is) getting people to pay more attention sometimes so they don't get taken in (by someone's smile). One of the characteristics of psychopaths is that they have this veneer of smiling. But it is possible to tell the difference between people who are genuinely pleased to see us and someone who is putting it on.
We are all suckers for a really, really gorgeous smile. And maybe it's not altogether to our good all the time.
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