What's in a Smile? Check out the Muscles
Want to know what it means when someone's smiling at you? According to newswise.com, it depends on what muscle they're using. That's right, muscle. “When distinguishing among smiles, both scientists and laypeople have tended to focus on true and false smiles. The belief is that if you smile when you’re not happy, the smile is false,” the web site quotes Paula Niedenthal, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “But people smile in many different circumstances and during many emotional states. So asserting that only smiles that result from states of happiness are ‘true’ smiles limits our understanding of this important facial expression.” Niedenthal and colleagues from Cardiff University and the University of Glasgow published a set of experiments that seek to expand our understanding of the human smile this week in the journal Psychological Science, showing three distinct, reliably recognized expressions — smiles of reward, affiliation and ...