SMILE

Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe on the set of John Huston's 'The Misfits' 

And the Whole World . . .

By CAROL TAVRIS

Lip Service
By Marianne LaFrance 
Norton, 336 pages, $26.95


A young man came up to me at a conference, smiling shyly, and asked what I thought of a popular but scientifically bogus method of "mental reprogramming." I was about to tell him exactly what I thought, when I paused and asked why he wanted to know. "They are teaching me how to interact with people," he said. "I have Asperger's. If I don't follow their technique, I look like this." And the life drained out of his face, as if an image on a chalkboard were being erased. As his smile vanished, so did our brief sense of connection. "Their technique is serving you well," I said. (click below to read more)


"A smile is a kind of golden compass," writes Marianne LaFrance in "Lip Service." "It is a social magnet, a trustworthiness meter, a device for diffusing anger, a patch for repairing frayed interpersonal bonds, and a lubricant for keeping social ties in good working order." Ms. LaFrance, a professor of psychology at Yale, has for many years been studying how nonverbal communication affects relationships—shaping and nurturing some but souring and killing others. Her book is a masterly example of social science at its best—a look at how researchers do their work, what questions they ask, how answers lead to new questions and why all of this matters in our everyday lives.
I had expected that an entire book on the smile would be too much about too little. Not a peep on glowering? No chapters on the facial displays of disgust, pride or contempt? But what a story hangs on the simple smile.
Women in business are often judged harshly if they don't smile. Yet if they do, they are seen as being 'too feminine.'
The author begins with facial physiology, which allows us to distinguish a fake or "social" smile from the genuine or "Duchenne" smile (named for the pioneering French neurologist who identified the relevant muscles), which involves eyes as well as lips. Ms. LaFrance then traces the development of smiles from infancy to adulthood, as the baby's evolutionarily programmed "ain't I cute? please take care of me" smile evolves into the child's ability to smile courteously when she is given an unwanted present.
Gradually the book expands its scope, revealing the role the smile plays in work, in politics, on the street and of course in close relationships, where humans smile to seduce, appease, disguise embarrassment and lie. The Duchenne smiles of couples genuinely in love, we learn, differ from the lip actions of couples in lust: The latter don't show many genuine smiles but lots of lip licks and bites. Forewarned is forearmed.
Men are, in general, pretty bad at telling the difference between women's genuine smiles and deliberate social smiles, frequently mistaking the latter for the former—a mistake that allows a man to believe that the woman is expressing sexual interest in him. (But then, many men interpret anything a woman does as acting out of sexual interest, including her saying "buzz off, buster.") Women in business and politics are often placed in a no-win situation: They are expected to smile and are judged harshly if they don't; if they do smile, they are often seen as being "too feminine," too sexual or otherwise professionally inappropriate.
Ms. LaFrance's most important smile research explores precisely this question of gender "performance." Women smile more than men not because they are innately conciliatory, sociable, seductive or outgoing but because they are more likely to be in a subordinate position, socially or professionally, and because they are more likely to be doing the kind of jobs that require what sociologists call "emotion labor": displaying pleasure, warmth and happiness. When the man is the subordinate, or when he is doing the customer-service work or the sales job, he is the smiler.
One of this book's intellectual pleasures is that Ms. LaFrance avoids the temptation to jump on the bandwagon of biological reductionism. Wave an fMRI or a PET scan nowadays and people think you are doing "science"; if an emotion or behavior can be measured in the brain, it's "real," and if it can't be measured in the brain, it isn't. But social and cultural rules are as powerful as any biological factor; they get inside us, affecting our brains and bodies in profound ways. For example, cultures differ in their smile rules, which is why Americans are often uncomfortable when the Japanese smile "too much," as if to cover embarrassment or shame, or when northern Europeans do not smile "enough," thereby appearing cold and aloof.

The importance of the smile is most apparent when we can't produce one. When a person can't smile—due to injury, illness, nerve damage, severe depression or cosmetic surgery gone awry—it is not only the observer who is spooked. The person's own ability to feel emotion and to empathize with others, Ms. LaFrance explains, is also substantially reduced. The evolutionary purpose of smiling (and other facial expressions) is to communicate our emotions not only to others but also to ourselves. Your mother was right: Smile and you'll feel happier; put the muscles of your face into a snarl and you'll feel angrier.
This is why, as Ms. LaFrance shows, Botox treatments smooth out feelings as well as wrinkles. When Botox is injected into the muscle that encircles the eyes to eliminate what Ms. LaFrance unfortunately calls "those awful crow's-feet wrinkles" (she of all people should refer to them as laugh lines!), it inhibits the muscles that convey delight, curiosity or irritation. Appropriately enough, it does not affect the fake smile.
Ms. LaFrance is, for my taste, a little too credulous about positive psychology. She uncritically reports a study showing that, many years later, women who displayed the most intense smiles in their college yearbook photos were more content, mentally focused and motivated to achieve. A nice finding indeed, but we cannot infer that smiling produced these benefits; perhaps both the smiling and the psychological benefits reflect a genetic predisposition underlying the personality traits of agreeableness and "positive affectivity." Besides, every society needs its curmudgeons, otherwise known as artists, comics and critics. Rembrandt, as Ms. LaFrance observes, "often depicted himself with a frown."
This lively, charming book will teach you about every sort of smile—the contemptuous smiles of Osama bin Laden and other mass murderers, the seductive smiles of con artists and psychopaths, the calculated smiles of politicians who know that too much smiling or too little can sink a campaign. Ms. LaFrance's true subject is not simply the smile but its uniquely human double purpose: to convey our feelings—and disguise them. As the Shakespearean villain who will become the evil King Richard III purrs:
Why, I can smile, and murder 
while I smile;
And cry content to that which 
grieves my heart;
And wet my cheeks with 
artificial tears,
And frame my face to all 
occasions.
—Ms. Tavris is the author, with Elliot Aronson, of "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)."