Left, non-Duchenne or social smile; right, Duchenne or genuine smile. Image: Megan Mangum.
All hail the powerful smile. The right smile, at the right time, wins friends and calms enemies. The smile held for too long, not long enough, flashed too intensively or too dimly, arouses suspicion, fear or anger.
Far from being a straightforward show of joy, the language of smiles is filled with subtlety: a meld of our inner state, surroundings, social training, conscious and unconscious.
The new book Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics, published August 8, explores the nuances and effects of an expression we use often, but rarely think about. Wired.com spoke with author, Marianne LaFrance, an experimental psychologist at Yale University, about why we smile, how we do it, and the rise of the emoticon.
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