The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [25]
And research in courtrooms shows that an apology offered with a smile incurs a lesser penalty than an apology without one. So Grandma was right.
Happy, submissive, or about to tear you limb from limb?
Why Smiling Is Contagious
The remarkable thing about a smile is that when you give it to someone, it causes them to reciprocate by returning the smile, even when you are both using fake smiles.
Professor Ulf Dimberg at Uppsala University, Sweden, conducted an experiment that revealed how your unconscious mind exerts direct control of your facial muscles. Using equipment that picks up electrical signals from muscle fibers, he measured the facial muscle activity on 120 volunteers while they were exposed to pictures of both happy and angry faces. They were told to make frowning, smiling, or expressionless faces in response to what they saw. Sometimes the face they were told to attempt was the opposite of what they saw— meeting a smile with a frown, or a frown with a smile. The results showed that the volunteers did not have total control over their facial muscles. While it was easy to frown back at a picture of an angry man, it was much more difficult to pull a smile. Even though volunteers were trying consciously to control their natural reactions, the twitching in their facial muscles told a different story—they were mirroring the expressions they were seeing, even when they were trying not to.
Professor Ruth Campbell, from University College, London, believes there is a “mirror neuron” in the brain that triggers the part responsible for the recognition of faces and expressions and causes an instant mirroring reaction. In other words, whether we realize it or not, we automatically copy the facial expressions we see.
This is why regular smiling is important to have as a part of your body-language repertoire, even when you don't feel like it, because smiling directly influences other people's attitudes and how they respond to you.
Science has proved that the more you smile, the
more positive reactions others will give you.
In over thirty years of studying the sales and negotiating process, we have found that smiling at the appropriate time, such as during the opening stages of a negotiating situation where people are sizing each other up, produces a positive response on both sides of the table that gives more successful outcomes and higher sales ratios.
How a Smile Tricks the Brain
The ability to decode smiles appears to be hardwired into the brain as an aid to survival. Because smiling is essentially a submission signal, ancestral men and women needed to be able to recognize whether an approaching stranger was friendly or aggressive, and those who failed to do this perished.
Do you recognize this actor?
When you look at the above photograph you'll probably identify actor Hugh Grant. When asked to describe his emotions in this shot, most people describe him as relaxed and happy because of his apparent smiling face. When the shot is turned the right way up, you get a completely different view of the emotional attitude conveyed.
We cut and pasted Grant's eyes and smile to produce a horrific-looking face, but as you can see, your brain can even identify a smile when a face is upside down. Not only can it do that, but the brain can separate the smile from every other part of the face. This illustrates the powerful effect a smile has on us.
Practicing the Fake Smile
As we've said, most people can't consciously differentiate between a fake smile and a real one, and most of us are content if someone is simply smiling at us—regardless of whether it's real or false. Because smiling is such a disarming gesture, most people wrongly assume that it's a favorite of liars. Research by Paul Ekman showed that when people deliberately lie, most, especially men, smile less than they usually do. Ekman believes this is because liars realize that most people associate smiling with lying so they intentionally decrease their smiles. A liar's smile comes more quickly than a genuine smile and is held