Often, you will hear that a smile is faked but the problem is that nobody tells you how a fake smile looks like. This has made you unnecessarily paranoid to even the good intents of people. Such wound in you would be healed after reading through this short article. Warshauer & Santamaria in their article rightly note that everyone smiles genuinely while we all fake it too. So, there is no need for you to play victim at this point. They defined a smile as “a natural expression of how we are feeling, as well as a façade for how we want others to view us.” According to the scholars, a smile can be both disarming and deceiving.
Smiling is an impulse not just reserved for expressing delight. The corners of the mouth can turn up when feeling frustrated or in certain instances of pain, for example. However, paying attention to more than the shape of the mouth can reveal how a person is really feeling. While trying to distinguish between a fake and genuine smile, they opine thus: “A smile in the midst of frustration will leave quickly, and a pasted-on, “Say cheese” smile will look unnatural on the face. But a genuine smile will build up gradually and be accompanied by the contraction of an involuntary muscle at the corners of both eyes. This full expression cannot be forced, as the muscle moving the outside corners of the eyes is only initiated when experiencing delight.”
Hence, it can be logically said that real happiness triggers a real smile…but real smiles may also do the same job in reverse. In a study comparing grins (and non-grins) in old yearbook pictures with levels of happiness years later, those captured with a genuine smile had the highest levels of satisfaction with life (Warshauer & Santamaria, 2017)
Rick Nauert (2018) also tries to explain what differences exist between a real and fake smile. A true smile is contagious but one offered just for the sake of social interaction might not. This is just done for the sake of politeness. New research suggests that not all smiles are created equal, that people respond differently to smiles that are not genuine. In fact, differing responses may reflect the unique social value of genuine smiles (Nauert, 2018).
“These findings give us the first clear suggestion that the basic processes that guide responses to reward also play a role in guiding social behavior on a moment-to-moment basis during interactions,” said psychological scientist and lead researcher Dr. Erin Heerey of Bangor University (UK).
“No two interactions are alike, yet people still manage to smoothly coordinate their speech and nonverbal behaviors with those of another person,” Heerey said.
She wondered whether the intrinsic value of different social cues like smiles may play a role in shaping our response to those cues. Polite smiles, for example, typically occur when sociocultural norms dictate that smiling is appropriate. Genuine smiles, on the other hand, signify pleasure, occur spontaneously and are indicated by engagement of specific muscles around the eye (Nauert, 2018).
Researchers believe the different responses suggest that genuine smiles are more valuable social rewards. Previous investigation has shown that genuine smiles promote positive social interactions, so learning to anticipate them is likely to be a critical social skill (Nauert, 2018).
Spanish scientists from the University of La Laguna also researched into the differences between a fake and genuine smile. One of the researchers, David Beltrán Guerrero said that while it’s easy to figure out when someone is angry, sad or scared, expressions of happiness are far more complicated, Huffington Post reports on its website.
The scientists considered how humans use other forms of expressions to hide their true emotional feelings. Reiterating the point that a smile is not at all times genuine, Guerrero said, “The smile plays a key role in recognizing others’ happiness. But, as we know, we are not really happy every time we smile.”
Some people smile to be polite, while others use it to conceal negative emotions. To take this line of thinking further, researchers “created faces comprising smiling mouths and eyes expressing non-happy emotions, and compared them with faces in which both mouths and eyes expressed the same type of emotional state” (Huffington Post, 2018).
“Whenever we smile, there are 2 potential muscles we activate. The first one is the zygomaticus major and it controls the corners of your mouth. Whenever this muscle only is activated, it’s not actually a genuine smile. Scientists call this also the “social” smile. The second muscle, known to show sincerity is the obicularisocculi and it encircles our eye socket,” Leo Widrich wrote on Buffer.
The Spanish researchers found that when a person’s smile was first looked at, it was very hard to tell between a real and a fake one. But the more a person looked at the smile and was then asked to categorize what ’emotion’ each expression was giving out, the influence of the smile wobbled a bit (Huffington Post, 2018).
Nicholas Fradet, a body language expert states three easy ways in which anybody can tell a fake smile from a real one:
- One of the key ingredients in a genuine smile is the movement of the orbicularis oculi muscle. This causes the eyes to close. The vast majority of people that fake smile will show no movements in the upper face area.
- For many people, crow’s feet appear outside the eyes when they smile honestly.
- Another way you can see if a person is fake smiling is if you can see the bottom teeth in her mouth (Huffington Post, 2018).
In conclusion, a true, real happy smile is a very strong and uplifting display. We like to see such smiles and they’re addicting to watch and mimic. “Fake” smiles however are much less efficient at such tasks, and at times they even leave a suspicious trace on them. There is hardly any other platform that can give you a clear cut difference as narrated here (SBL, 2018).
References
Huffington Post (2018). Can You Tell the Difference Between a Fake Smile and a Real Smile? Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/07/fake-smile-real-smile-the-difference_n_4056325.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS5uZy8&guce_referrer_cs=i7lYO4s9Hi2TZQ0gxRTwKw
Nauert, R (2018). Real Smiles, Fake Smiles: What’s the Difference? Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/06/13/real-smiles-fake-smiles-whats-the-difference/55984.html
SBL (2018).Real or Fake Smile?Body Language of Smiles. Retrieved from http://www.study-body-language.com/fake-smile.html
Warshauer&Santamaria, (2017). Telling the Difference Between Real and Fake Smiles. Retrieved from https://backbaybostondentist.com/difference-between-real-fake-smile/
Images are from: https://www.freepik.com/, https://www.pexels.com/ (C) 2022, Alan Elangovan, All Copy Rights Reserved.