Joanna Hawthorne, a research psychologist at Cambridge University, works with new parents, encouraging them to judge their babies’ states so that they can choose the right moment for interaction – when the baby is alert but neither too hungry nor too full. It may only last a few seconds but this is the time when an adult and a small baby can take turns in smiling. If a baby smiles at us, we take it as a sign that they like us and we smile and behave warmly back and so the cycle continues.
Smiling also appears to play a crucial role in social interaction between adults. There is a rare condition called Moebius syndrome, where a person’s face becomes paralysed, leaving them unable to smile. One consequence is that they can often find it hard to make or keep friends. This suggests that there is an important social element to smiling, as does the fact that however happy people are with their own company, they smile far more when others are present. In an experiment conducted in a bowling alley it was found that after achieving a strike, people beamed more when they turned to face their friends than at that most satisfying of moments when they watched all the triangle of skittles collapse in a heap.
More recently some Spanish researchers took advantage of the location of the 1992 Olympics to watch twenty-two gold medal winners very carefully, including Sally Gunnell. They observed them while waiting to mount the podium, standing on the podium and turning towards the flagpole while their national anthem was played. They found that people smiled more during the second stage, despite presumably feeling happy that they’d won in the other two stages as well. This the researchers took as a demonstration of the fact that people are more likely to smile when they’re in a social situation rather than when they’re just feeling happy. However, it should be remembered that there are social rules prescribing when it is and isn’t acceptable to smile; one moment when Olympic winners are expected to look sombre is during their national anthem.
The mysterious relationship between smiles and joy has been investigated by Paul Ekman in an extraordinary experiment. Without actually telling people to smile, he gave people precise instructions about which muscles to move, and despite being unaware that they were smiling, the physical process of moving those specific muscles into a smile made people feel happier. In a variation on this experiment the psychologist Fritz Strack gave people a pen to hold in their mouth. The instructed action of holding the pen between the teeth without touching the lips mimicked the movement of a smile, but once again the subjects of the experiment were unaware of the expression they were making.
They were given cartoons to watch and rated them as funnier when the pen was in this position than when they were told to suck the pen with their lips closed around it.
The idea is that the facial muscles are so sensitive that they can feed back their position to the brain and somehow lift the smiler’s mood. This is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. It seems that what we previously thought of as the result of an emotion (a smile) can also be the cause. Even posture can change your mood; sitting upright makes you feel happier than when you’re slumped. It isn’t clear exactly how these processes might work and, indeed, the change in mood usually doesn’t last for long. Is it the case that you become aware that you are smiling which makes you feel good or is it purely physiological?
The nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James believed that emotions are caused by our awareness of physical sensations and claimed to have used his own theory to work his way out of depression; the more he smiled, the better he felt. Perhaps it is the case that smiling bravely through your tears can make you feel better, in the same way that looking up at the sky if you feel miserable improves your mood slightly, because it’s a movement you would usually make when you are happy. An extension of this theory might explain why we tend to like smiley people. The more they smile, the more we smile back, which could, in turn, make us feel happier.
an experiment
Try this. Stand up and then move your body as though you are laughing uncontrollably. Bend forward, clutching your sides, with your shoulders shaking. You could even introduce the occasional knee-slap. Now try to remember exactly what this feels like physically within your body. Then stand up straight again and imagine that you’re doubled up with laughter, but this time don’t move, just think of those movements. Don’t think of a funny occasion or a joke. Simply imagine that your body is experiencing uncontrollable laughter and then see how you feel.
This exercise isn’t easy, but Nakia Gordon from Michigan State University succeeded in training people to do just this. After three one-hour training sessions, along with plenty of practice at home, most of the volunteers in her studies were able to lie absolutely still in a brain scanner while imagining either laughing, crying or walking. Each movement resulted in a different pattern of brain activation. This experiment shows that emotions can be linked to bodily movements, something William James had thought so long ago. Moreover the people taking part felt happier after imagining laughter, and sadder after imagining crying, even though they were instructed only to imagine the movements, not the feeling of those emotions. This opens up the possibility that it’s not just that smiling can make you feel better, just thinking about smiling or laughing might do the same trick.
the laughing umbrella
On the pavement beside a main road in south London two pairs of legs are visible emerging from a huge yellow tent which seems to hover above the people’s heads and only comes down as far as their knees. The whole tent is shaking slightly and from inside there’s the sound of a person laughing uncontrollably. A few people stop and stare, wondering just who these two people are and what could be going on. Then the tent is lifted off and collapsed like an umbrella. Red-faced with laughter the man thanks the woman with blonde, spiky hair for cheering up his day and walks off up the road, still chuckling quietly to himself. Then the woman approaches another passer-by, introduces herself as the artist Nicola Green, and invites her to come under her umbrella. She is collecting laughter and has found that her customised umbrella provides people with the privacy to laugh while she stands with them making a recording. As a portrait artist she had explored unusual ways of capturing the ‘essence of a person’ by painting a family portrait as the backs of people’s heads or a line of feet. Then she noticed how much a person’s laugh reveals and decided that this was the way to access their joy.
Laughing on cue isn’t easy, as I discovered when I stood in her living room under her laughing umbrella. If you’re passing by in the street then the ludicrous nature of the situation might make it easy, but since I’d arranged to meet Nicola and knew exactly what she was doing, when it actually came to it, I found it surprisingly difficult to laugh. Luckily she has ways of helping reluctant laughers. By encouraging you to fake a ridiculous cackle, she makes you laugh genuinely. She even went on the tube in London, where laughing between strangers simply doesn’t happen, chose a carriage and then shouted out, ‘I want to record your laughter. When I blow the whistle I want you all to laugh.’ Twitching glances crossed the carriage between passengers. Should they do it or not? Could you risk being the only person to laugh? Would it be better to ignore her and hope she moves on? In that split second people make a decision about whether to laugh. She found that either a whole carriage would laugh or nobody would. At Victoria station she somehow persuaded the platform attendants to make a tannoy announcement asking everyone to laugh. Eventually she made