Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
~Mark Twain
I have been interested in the art of smiling since my first graduate school paper The Biological and Maturational Development of the Smile in the Neonate. You don’t really want to know how long ago that was, but to give you a rough idea — I wrote it while wearing my bellbottoms.
Back then I learned that infants initially smile as a type of reflex, almost as a way of getting them jump-started, but very soon afterward that grimace emerges into a social smile. They learn how to engage their caretakers, get some attention, be loved and, most importantly, survive. This means that a social smile has Darwinian value. But more than survival, a smile may be the doorway into understanding what brings us the good life.
Researchers LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner (2001) analyzed college yearbook photographs of women displaying what is known as a Duchenne smile — an honest, genuine, bona fide smile — versus a non-Duchenne smile.
The Duchenne smile was named after Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, who, speaking of Darwin, greatly influenced Darwin’s book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Duchenne was a French neurologist interested in determining how the physiognomy of the face produced facial expressions, which he thought were directly linked to the soul. His investigations involved electricallt stimulating various muscles and identifying corresponding emotions. Along the way he identified a particular type of smile that engages both the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi — muscles that raise the corners of the mouth and cheeks, respectively. In other words, a big, genuine smile contracts the corners of our mouth and eyes.
Since we humans can’t voluntarily control the outer contraction of the orbicularis oculi — the muscle that gives us the “crow’s feet” — a smile that produces uplift at the corners of the eyes is considered to be more genuine. If you only produce a smile that turns up the corners of the mouth … well, as Duchenne may have said, the source of pleasure ain’t coming from your soul. In essence, the non-Duchenne smile is contrived, whereas the genuine smile seems to emanate from a deeper connection to one’s joy.
In the longitudinal study of Mills College graduates, Keltner and colleague LeeAnne Harker coded the smiles of 114 women who had their university yearbook photo taken sometime during 1958 and 1960. All but three of the young women smiled. However, 50 had Duchenne smiles and 61 had non-Duchenne, courtesy smiles.
The genuine smile group were more likely to get and stay married, and had higher score evaluations of physical and emotional wellbeing. Remarkably, Keltner’s study was able to find this connection more than 30 years after the college photos were taken. As in the famous Nun Study, where essays written by young women hoping to enter a convent were analyzed for their positive phrases, these early indications of upbeat emotions had predictive validity of future wellbeing.
In both the Nun Study and the Mills College research a measure of early positive expression, one through writing and one through smiling, determined the effect of this positivity over the lifespan. Could it really be that a paragraph or a smile expressed in young adulthood really denotes our outlook on life?
You betcha.
Whether expressed in an essay or a genuine smile, our future wellbeing seems predictable. This in and of itself would be interesting news, but there’s more: How intensely you smile may predict exactly how good of a life you are going to have.
In a 2009 study entitled Smile Intensity in Photographs Predicts Longevity, researchers Ernest L. Abel and Michael L. Kruger were able to demonstrate that people with positive emotions throughout the lifespan are happier, have more stable personalities, more stable marriages, and better cognitive and interpersonal skills than those with negative emotions. But it isn’t even what they were studying was so intriguing, it was whom they studied.
It wasn’t nuns or young women in college — it was Major League Baseball players. Data on their lives and photographs from the Baseball Register from 1952 were available for study. What the researchers found was that of the 230 images and individuals they studied, they identified the Duchenne smile, but with the addition of smile intensity — including a partial smile and no smile — as a factor. The results are in line with hosts of other studies demonstrating that positive emotions correlate with variables including mental and physical health and longevity.
Abel and Kruger concluded that the quality and intensity of the baseball players’ smiles predicted how well they scored on the variables listed above. Most notably, how well they smiled predicted how long they lived.
So the next time you are going to have your picture taken, smile as if your life depends on it. And if you can only give us that non-Duchenne smile of yours, then you may want to follow the wisdom of W. C. Fields, a man who knew a thing or two about making people grin: “Start every day with a smile and get it over with.”
7 comments
Your blog put a smile on my face!
I see a potential problem with both these studies. When a formal portrait photo is being taken, as for a yearbook or the Baseball Register, if the photographer simply says (perhaps for the 50th time that day), “OK, now, smile,” it’s likely to elicit a social smile, because there’s really nothing to smile *at*.
A more skilled and sensitive photographer, on the other hand, probably has a repertoire of funny lines that are likely to elicit a Duchenne smile.
In other words, the nature of the interaction between subject and photographer may be more determinative of the type of smile in the photo than the positivity of the subject alone.
Interesting observations, but I don’t buy it.
Were the results of the study of female graduation photographs controlled to account for women who might merely be uncomfortable sitting for formal photographic portraiture? Maybe some of them didn’t want their crinkles to show. Maybe they suffered from bad dentistry.
Was any effort put into finding out whether the women who couldn’t or wouldn’t Duchenne smile extravagantly for the portrait camera repeated that response in candid photographs or in real life. Maybe they laughed like maniacs at parties, with fully crinkled and crows-footed eyecorners.
As well, how did the uninhibited smilers look in candid photos? How do you know they didn’t walk around in real life like that mope Buster Keaton?
I’ve noticed contemporary female fashion models suck on lemons before photographs and smile about as often as zombies might. Except at parties.
Further, before, say, 1915, no one — women, baseball players, children, Abraham Lincoln — smiled in photographs, not even for courtesy.
But, look, they’re all dead. Could there be a connection? Maybe John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln because he thought the latter looked grim in photos. Just kidding.
We could account for the lack of smiling in old photographs by noting the slowness of shutter speed in those days, but that’s one too many questions.
My conclusion about smiling in canned photographs is like my conclusion about whether the Mona Lisa is smiling in the painting and, if so, what is she smiling about, in other words — it’s a mystery without better data.
Thanks, and that’s a great W.C. Fields line.
It occurs to me that the real estate supplement in every large daily paper in the U.S. contains phalanxes of realtor head shots with 300-watt smiles. There are more crow’s feet per copy inch than you could find in “Ornithology Weekly”.
It’s a hothouse of Duchenne Smiling. But I’m thinking they are smiling with their eyes while their hands are busy working overtime.
Does this mean insincerity leads to long life? I mean, when a realtor shines the light on me, I smile back non-Duchennely and then run and check the prospective property’s basement for water damage.
Politicians say “cheese” every minute of their waking lives and in every photograph.
And finally, before I go away, there are two actors who perfected the non-Duchenne smile — the mouth is smiling but the eyes are not participating — Lawrence Olivier in “Richard III”, “Sleuth”, and, most effectively, “The Entertainer”, and Robert De Niro in, well, everything.
Thank you for the thought-provoking post.
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