The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [30]
feature. Our intuition tells us to stay away from those
with a Down-Mouth expression
Smiling Advice for Women
Research by Marvin Hecht and Marianne La France from Boston University has revealed how subordinate people smile more in the presence of dominant and superior people, in both friendly and unfriendly situations, whereas superior people will smile only around subordinate people in friendly situations.
This research shows that women smile far more than men in both social and business situations, which can make a woman appear to be subordinate or weak in an encounter with unsmiling men. Some people claim that women's extra smiling is the result of women historically being placed by men into subordinate roles, but other research shows that by the age of eight weeks, baby girls smile far more than baby boys, so it's probably inborn as opposed to learned. The likely explanation is that smiling fits neatly into women's evolutionary role as pacifiers and nurturers. It doesn't mean a woman can't be as authoritative as a man; but the extra smiling can make her look less authoritative.
Women's extra smiling is probably
hardwired into the brain.
Social psychologist Dr. Nancy Henley, at UCLA, described a woman's smile as “her badge of appeasement” and it is often used to placate a more powerful male. Her research showed that, in social encounters, women smile 87 percent of the time versus 67 percent for men, and that women are 26 percent more likely to return smiles from the opposite sex. An experiment using fifteen photographs of women showing happy, sad, and neutral faces were rated for attractiveness by 257 respondents. The women with the sad expressions were considered the least attractive. Pictures of unsmiling women were decoded as a sign of unhappiness, while pictures of unsmiling men were seen as a sign of dominance. The lessons here are for women to smile less when dealing with dominant men in business or to mirror the amount of smiling that men do. And if men want to be more persuasive with women, they need to smile more in all contexts.
Laughter in Love
Robert Provine found that in courtship, it's also women who do most of the laughing and smiling, not men. Laughing in these contexts is used as a way of determining how successfully a couple is likely to bond in a relationship. Simply put, the more he can make her laugh, the more attractive she will find him. This is because the ability to make others laugh is perceived as a dominant trait and women prefer dominant males, while males prefer subordinate females. Provine also found that a subordinate person will laugh to appease a superior person and the superior person will make subordinates laugh—but without laughing himself—as a way of maintaining his superiority.
Studies show that women laugh at men they're attracted to,
and men are attracted to women who laugh at them.
This explains why having a sense of humor is near the top of women's priority list of what they look for in a man. When a woman says, “He's such a funny guy—we spent the whole night laughing together,” she usually means that she spent the night laughing and he spent the night making her laugh.
From a man's perspective, saying that a
woman has a good sense of humor doesn't mean
she tells jokes; it means she laughs at his jokes.
On a deeper level, men seem to understand the attraction value of being humorous and spend much of their time with other men competing to tell the best joke to enhance their own status. Many men also become annoyed when one man dominates the joke-telling, especially when women are present and are also laughing. Men are likely to think the joke-teller is not only a jerk but he isn't particularly funny, either, come to think of it— despite the fact he has all the women in fits of laughter. The point for men to understand is that humorous men look more attractive to most women. Fortunately, you can learn to be humorous.
How a woman sees a man: the picture on the left is how a woman perceives the man who doesn't make her laugh.