Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
~Mark TwainI 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.
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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.