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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 ...

A young professor claims that you can tell anything about anything -- whether a company, or a marriage, will succeed -- just by, well, looking at it. Not a glimpse of course, but by carefully observing it. Hertenstein , an associate professor of psychology at DePauw University, is a leading expert in the field of nonverbal communication,  and has written a book, The Tell , about it. It's all about how we can predict just about anything about a person or thing by little nonverbal clues. For example, he tells smartplanet.com that, for  male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, the power they’re perceived to have on their faces in a photo — not necessarily how attractive they are — is what predicts the profits of their Fortune 500 companies.  Perhaps more interesting, babies exposed to bad smells, loud noises and mobiles shaken in their faces who had bad reactions to these disturbances were much more likely, in later life, to become shy, reticent kids. "If I really wante...

I'm often capable of making my husband frown. Whether's it's because I didn't make our son start homework at 4, or dinner is late (or not big enough), he's often cranky when he comes home from work. And before you know it, I'm cranky, too. It's not so much that his obnoxiousness makes me obnoxious (although he might argue that), but that our own feelings and emotions tend, unconsciously, to mimic those around us. http://www.contemplativecomputing.org/2011/01/smiles-emotion-and-embodied-knowledge.html