two men, two paths, two smiles
While reading a commentary by Nicholas Kristof, I found something I’ve been looking for for some time – something that wasn’t actually relevant to the content of the editorial. The editorial is about two African-American males in the US, one of whom attended Johns Hopkins and was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, the other who will spend the rest of his life behind bars. Both men have the same name (but are not related), and in many ways each could have become the other. The Rhodes recipient could have entered a life of crime while the criminal behind bars could have graduated college with a promising career in his future. Kristof writes a well-written commentary on what can be done to foster more of the good outcomes and avoid some of the bad outcomes. Please read it and ponder.
The thing that struck my attention though—which again had nothing to do with the article—was the picture of the Rhodes recipient with a classmate and friend of his. Check it out. This is perhaps the best example of a fake smile and a real smile right beside each other.
I’ve cropped the relevant portion of the picture below. What do you see? The man on the left, Wes Moore (the Rhodes recipient and the success story in Kristof’s editorial), clearly has a genuine smile (what Dr. Paul Ekman calls an “enjoyment smile” as opposed to a “non-enjoyment smile”). You’ll notice that the man on the left not only contracts the zygomatic muscles in the lower part of the face (moving the cheeks up and forming the U-shape of the mouth), but the muscles orbiting the eyes also contract (obicularis oculi). That involuntary contraction is a significant factor in differentiating the fake vs the real smile (and in a still image, probably the only way of distinguishing the two).
The man on the right is posing, of course. He’s faking a smile by flexing his zygomatic muscles, but there’s no contraction of the muscles around the eyes. He’s doing what I’ll call a “courtesy smile.” It’s forced, but socially required for the picture.
In fact, the smile is the most common (emotional) mask we wear. We smile at co-workers, only for that smile to quickly evaporate when they’ve passed. Or we might retain smiles much longer than is natural if we are posing for the camera. In real footage (rather than just a still picture), the timing and duration of smiles is another way of distinguishing the fake from the real thing. Real smiles are “smoother” in their formation and in their fading away (called onset and offset, respectively). And then there’s the fact that, for a real smile, the face will be much more symmetrical than a fake smile, which will favor one side of the face (typically the left).
Smiles intrigue me because, unlike most other emotions, people regularly wear smiles as an emotional mask. That is not as common with anger, sadness, disgust, etc. But happiness/enjoyment are often feigned. Not that the fake smile is bad—it’s normal to show a fake smile in an enormous number of contexts: politeness, show of submission, non-threatening signal, etc. But if you want to differentiate the fake from the real smile, ignore the bottom part of the face and look at the eyes.