Twenty-five summers ago, as I served that reliable customer his four burgers and coffee, I am absolutely confident that not a trace of orbicularis oculi activity was to be seen on my late-pubescent face. I would have been an easy case study for Ekman; it would have been simple for him to reveal which negative states—despair, frustration, contempt—I was attempting to hide with my halfhearted McD smile. Off work, and at last with friends jumping off rocks into alpine rivers, I am sure the D smiles would have washed over my face. Studies inspired by Ekman’s analysis would reveal that these D smiles are a glue of social life, and a provenance of the camaraderie that make me nostalgic for those carefree times.
THE SMILE AS SOCIAL CHOCOLATE
In the 1980s developmental psychologists Ed Tronick, Jeff Cohn, and Tiffany Field became interested in what postpartum depression does to mother-child interactions. Their studies, and those of other investigators, revealed that postpartum depression mutes the positive emotionality of the mother—she smiles less, she vocalizes with less warm intonation, and her positive emotional repertoire is less contingent upon the actions of her child. Children of mothers experiencing postpartum depression tend to show complementary behavior—they are more agitated, distressed, and anxious.
Answers to the smile quiz on chapter 6: For the first gentleman, the D smile is on the right; for the second, it’s on the left.
This kind of result is compellingly intuitive. Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic. Yet from a scientific standpoint, the finding—the mother’s impoverished positive emotional repertoire brings about anxiety and agitation in the child—is plagued by alternative explanations. Perhaps agitated, fussy infants produce muted positive emotionality and depression in the mother. Perhaps they both share some genetically based tendency that predisposes their parent-child interactions to lack mutual smiles, coos, touches, and play. Perhaps their shared emotional condition is the product of deeper structural causes—underpaid work, poverty, alienated or abusive husbands, and the like.
So to study the role of smiling and muted positive emotionality in parent-child interactions, Tronick, Cohn, and Field developed what has come to be known as the still-face paradigm. This experimental technique is profoundly simple but powerful: The mother is requested to simply be in the presence of her young infant, say nine months old, but to show no facial expressions whatsoever, and none of the most common of facial expressions for young mothers—smiles. As the young child navigates around the laboratory environment, approaching toy robots and stuffed elephants and brightly colored objects that make farm animal noises, the child looks to the mother’s face for signals about the environment. The child seeks information in facial muscle movements about what is safe, fun, and worthy of curious exploration, and what is not, and the mother sits there impassionate, stone-faced, and unresponsive.
The results are astonishing. In a smile-impoverished environment, the young child no longer explores the environment, no longer approaches novel toys or play structures; her imagination shuts down. The child quickly becomes agitated and distressed, often wildly so, arching his or her back and crying out. The child will often move to the mother and try to provoke her, stir her out of her stupor, with a vocalization or touch or encouraging smile. And as the child begins to resign herself to the unexpressive condition of the mother, she moves away from the mother, refusing eye contact, and eventually falls into listlessness and torpor.
The same is true, albeit on a much smaller scale, with adults. Friends of depressives find their interactions, research shows, to be unrewarding, and at times difficult to sustain. In conversations with individuals who show little positive emotion in the face or voice, participants engage in less responsive social behavior—playful laughs, smiles, head nods, knowing mutual gazes—and experience the conversations as unrewarding.
The smiles, and I should say D smiles, which punctuate our daily interactions—between parents and children, flirting strangers, friends sharing a silent moment of satirical commentary upon an acquaintance—are like social chocolate. With chocolate waiting to be enjoyed, young children, and a good many adults, will do just about anything with verve—mow through that side of vegetables, clean hamster cages, listen to long-winded adult stories, finish an odious task at work. The same is true of smiles; they are the first incentives toward which young children move, and that parents hungrily seek. In relevant research, when one-year-old infants sit at the edge of a visual cliff, a glass surface over a precipitous drop, with their mother on the other side, the infant immediately looks to the mother for information about this ambiguous scene, which looks both dangerous and passable. If the mother shows fear, not a single child will crawl across the glass surface. If the mother smiles, my Berkeley colleague Joe Campos finds, approximately 80 percent of the infants will eagerly cross the surface, risking potential harm, to be in the warm, reassuring midst of their mother’s smile.
From the standpoint of the person smiling, we know from elegant work by Barbara Fredrickson and Robert Levenson that when people emit D smiles when experiencing stress, their level of cardiovascular arousal quickly moves to a more quiescent baseline. My hunch is that, as Darwin observed, with the D smile the individual exhales strongly, which calms stress-related physiology. We have also already seen that in the midst of a D smile, the smiler’s left portion of the frontal lobes—a region of the brain that processes information about rewards and enables goal-directed action—is activated.
Perhaps more dramatic is what the smile does to the person perceiving it. The definitive work on this topic has been done by Ulf Dimberg and Arne Öhman, working in labs in Norway and Sweden, respectively. These investigators have pioneered techniques for presenting images of facial expressions to perceivers at incredibly fast speeds, outside of the perceivers’ conscious awareness. Most typically, in what is known as the backward masking paradigm, they present slides of facial expressions (for example, facial displays of anger or the smile) for exceptionally brief periods—say, 100 milliseconds. Immediately following the image of the smile, another image is presented—say, of a neutral face, or a chair—which wipes out the participant’s ability to consciously represent the image of the smile. In the backward masking paradigm, participants cannot tell you with any reliability what first image they have just seen; the smile (or comparison facial display) has only been perceived at the unconscious level. And yet people who have viewed smiles in this fashion are more likely to smile and report greater contentment and well-being, and in some studies, they show calmer cardiovascular physiology. They have no idea what they have just seen, but the smile has enhanced their well-being.
It goes deeper than this. Richard Depue and Jeannine Morrone-Strupinsky suggest that perceiving smiles in others, most likely of the Duchenne variety, triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which facilitates friendly approach and affiliation. As one illustration, dopamine is activated in heterosexual males by viewing the smiles of attractive females. Smiles catapult individuals toward one another, and in the more intimate space produced by mutual smiles a more proximal set of behaviors—touch and soothing vocalizations—kick into action, soothing, calming, and triggering the release of opiates, which bring about powerful feelings of warmth, calmness, and intimacy.
When you see the exchange of D smiles between a father and a toddler on a swing, between two adults flirting in the corner of a room, between two friends laughing over their latest efforts at work or romance, or between two strangers navigating who goes through the door first or who takes the last egg roll at the buffet—one cannot help but be struck by the simplicity of social pleasure. Two smiles are exchanged within the span of a second or two, this small but universal element of decorum is honored, a
nd the day continues. Within the bodies of those individuals, however, are reciprocally coordinated surges of dopamine and the opiates. Stress-related cardiovascular response reduces. A sense of trust and social well-being rises. The smile is the dessert of our social lives. It evolved as a neon-light signal of cooperativeness, it became embedded in social exchanges between individuals that give rise to closeness and affiliation. The right kind of smile is a common contributor to the numerator of the jen ratio and a gateway to the life well lived. And this was the hypothesis I tested in an unusual study of yearbook photos of graduates from a small women’s college in 1960, just about to head out into a world that would turn tumultuous.
FLEETING MOMENTS OF THE COURSE OF LIFE
Ravenna Helson is a pioneer in the study of women’s lives. In the early stages of her scientific career in the 1950s, she was interested in the intellectual creativity of women—an area almost entirely ignored by psychological science—and interviewed female pioneers in mathematics and the physical sciences. She then turned her scientific imagination to the question of how identity develops. Almost all of the longitudinal research on identity and the course of life had been done on men; the lifespan development of the other half of the species was a mystery. In 1959, a few years prior to publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ravenna initiated what would become the longest longitudinal study of the lives of women ever conducted, the Mills Longitudinal Study. This study has followed the lives of approximately 110 women who graduated from Mills College in 1959 and 1960 for the past fifty years, and continues to this day. It has led to basic discoveries about how identity shifts over the course of life for women, and how it remains the same.
In 1999 Ravenna stopped by my office with a generous offer. She noted, in her slight Texas drawl and gentle style, that she had gathered college yearbook photos of her subjects. She wondered whether I might be interested, with a student of hers, LeeAnne Harker, in exploring whether her Mills participants’ smiles, captured when they were graduating from college, would say anything about the next thirty years of their lives. The more conventional side to my scientific mind predisposed me to politely decline. The premise that expressive behavior gathered in one instant in time (in the few milliseconds it takes for the shutter to open) in such an artificial context (having your yearbook photo taken by a stranger) could actually predict anything meaningful about an individual’s life violated the most sacred laws of studying individuals scientifically. Within the study of individuals, it is canonical to sample a person’s behavior many times and in a diverse and revealing array of contexts. A more representative sampling of observations guarantees more reliable inferences about who the person is. If you want to know whom to marry or what friend to travel with, you’re best served by seeing them when grumpy in the morning after a bad night’s sleep, when handling the stress of a conflict, when experiencing pain, around their mothers and ex-spouses, and when things go really well, and not just when sparkling in witty repartee at a cocktail party. Relying upon one yearbook photo as a potential measure of the person’s identity was problematic in this regard, to say the least.
Also problematic was the notion of discerning muscle movements from static photos. All research on facial expression had relied upon video or moving pictures, in which the effects of the facial muscle movements are evident in the onset and offset of changes in the appearance of the face. In identifying D smiles, for example, one needs to see the crow’s-feet, cheek raise, and lower eyelid pouch, all subtle judgments that are best made when one can see these actions appear and disappear in video over time.
Undaunted, LeeAnne Harker and I took a week to code the yearbook photos of 110 women, carefully looking for evidence of the activity of the zygomatic major muscle as well as the oribicularis oculi. This coding produced a score between 0 and 10 capturing the warmth of each woman’s smile.
LeeAnne and I then took this measure of the warmth of the smile and related it to the treasure trove of measures Ravenna had gathered on these Mills alumnae when the women returned to the Berkeley lab, often flying in from great distances, when they were twenty-seven, forty-two, and fifty-two. This included measures of their daily stress, their personalities, the health of their marriages, and their sense of meaning and well-being as they moved into middle age.
What we discovered about the benefits of the warm smile would fit the analysis of the smile developed here, and would prompt readers of the study to rustle around their closets in search of their yearbooks. Warm D smiles promote high jen ratios and the meaningful life.
Mills alumnae who showed warmer, stronger D smiles when they were twenty reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years. The smile mitigates anxiety and pain, most likely through the effects smiling has on stress-related cardiovascular arousal. The strong D smilers also reported feeling more connected to those around them; the smile helps trigger greater trust and intimacy with others.
The warmth of a woman’s smile also predicted a rising trajectory in her sense that she was achieving her goals. Women with warmer smiles for the next thirty years became more organized, mentally focused, and achievement-oriented. Forget what people have told you about creativity and achievement emerging out of despair and anxiety. Not so. Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative, expansive, generative, synthetic, and loosened up in their thought. Our Mills women who showed warmer smiles reflected these benefits of positive emotion across their lives.
Our results concerning the relationships of the Mills alumnae were perhaps even more striking. These women were brought to UC Berkeley to spend a day with other individuals, as well as a group of scientists who wrote up personal narratives based on their impressions of the women. Women with warm smiles made much more favorable impressions upon the scientists in this context, suggesting that the smile enables more positive social encounters.
Turning to marriage, those women who displayed warmer smiles were more likely to be married by age twenty-seven, less likely to have remained single into middle adulthood, and more likely to have satisfying marriages thirty years later. Much has been made of the toxic effect on marriages of negative emotions like contempt and ceaseless carping and criticism. John Gottman and Robert Levenson can predict with 92 percent accuracy that a couple will divorce when the partners show high levels of contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These negative emotions are like poison. What about marital happiness? Here Gottman and colleagues are starting to show that respect, kindness, and humor help married couples deal more effectively with conflict in their relationships. This was the story in our study: Women with warmer smiles had healthier marriages.
Finally, women with warmer smiles at age twenty reported a more fulfilling life at age fifty-two. Across young and middle adulthood, women prone to expressing positive emotions experience fewer psychological and physical difficulties and greater satisfaction with their lives.
You are probably thinking several things right now about this study. Most importantly, what did you look like in your yearbook photos? (I was wearing a velvet bow tie in one yearbook photo, with a silk disco shirt and a slightly uncomfortable smile.) More importantly, you should definitely be searching through that cardboard box of family memorabilia out in the garage to find out what your partner looked like, for that is likely to say a lot about your own current happiness.
What about the following alternative thesis—the just say yes thesis—that what we’re observing in this pattern of results is simply women who say yes to everything, regardless of whether they truly endorse what they are saying, or are happy or not. Perhaps there is a certain group of our women who, in the desire to please others, smile, say they feel connected to others, report accomplishing their life’s work, and report being happy in their marriages; but in actuality their lives are a neurotic mess of anxiety, self-deception, and despair. There is a measure of this te
ndency to say socially desirable things to others, and in fact, when we statistically controlled for the women’s tendency toward this, all of the results held up. The warm smile has positive benefits independent of just being outwardly and inauthentically agreeable to others.
Okay, what about beauty? Physical attractiveness has been shown to have a host of benefits for individuals, from an increased number of friends to larger raises in the workplace. Perhaps it was the beautiful Mills grads who had the warm smiles, and thus, perhaps it was beauty, and not the warmth captured in the D smile, that produced the results that we observed. Perhaps the long-term benefits of the warm smile in this study simply reduced to being outwardly beautiful. As it turns out, beauty is remarkably easy to judge from photos. We had a group of undergraduates rate the beauty of the 110 Mills alumnae in our study. More beautiful Mills grads did indeed feel more connected to others, less anxiety, and greater well-being. Importantly, the warmth of a woman’s smile still predicted less anxiety, increased warmth toward others, greater competence, and healthier marriages and increased personal happiness when we controlled for how beautiful the participants were. Warmth and kindness differ from physical beauty.
SMILES AND THE ORIGINS OF HAPPINESS
Sometimes the simplest questions are disarmingly hard to answer. A graduate advisor of mine once stopped me in my tracks with this one: “So you’re studying emotion…answer this one. Why do orgasms feel good?” I mumbled something about the opioids, and dopamine, and oxytocin, and then collapsed into a state of blushing, bumbling confusion. He was asking about the origins of happiness and pleasure—where they come from, and what their basic elements are—and my answer wasn’t much of an answer. Electrochemical signals in the brain and body cannot provide a satisfying answer about the nature of experience or, in this case, what the roots of pleasure and happiness might be. What are the deeper evolutionary contexts that led to the centrality of the smile in our social life? Where does happiness come from?
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 12
