What You Should Know About Smiling

When Michael Phelps and relay teammates Ryan Murphy (L), Cory Miller and Nathan Adrian smiled from the podium in Rio, they were communicating to their family, the spectators, and the viewers back home. There were saying something primal, according to the acclaimed researcher Paul Ekman. In victory,  the arms are raised in celebration and the smile becomes an embrace.

Your facial expression is a powerful part of the instinctual assessment people are conducting 24/7. When people meet you or see you take the front of the room to make a presentation, they are looking for trustworthiness. An unfriendly face pulls up a barrier that works against you.

The pioneer researcher who first taught us about non-verbal communication was Albert Mehrabian, UCLA professor emeritus of psychology. In 1971, he released a groundbreaking study that found the impression and the impact of your overall communication is 7% words, 38% vocal tone and color, and 55% visual.

That does not mean words aren’t important. Mehrabian was not looking at the integrity of a lecture given to an audience of specialists. Clearly, if you are called to lecture on quantum physics, you better know your subatomic particles.

Instead Mehrabian was asking, “On what do I base the primary information about your trustworthiness?” He found the answer to be the way you look, your facial expression, your tone of voice, and the way you move — not what you say.

What does your facial expression tell people? Do you appear engaged, aloof, interested, disinterested, passionate, bored, warm, lukewarm, sparkling, flat, fully present, distracted?

Researchers have found that we are born using and recognizing facial expressions — there is even a part of the brain devoted to the signal received by facial expressions. We come into this world recognizing the human face. We don’t turn off a part of our brain because we’re discussing business.

The Real Thing

Last year, I attended the wedding of a friend in a beautiful chapel. The service was short, but the photo-taking took forever. Time and time again, the bride and groom smiled for the camera. After a half hour, the entire wedding party became fatigued, but everyone pushed on, holding poses while the emotion left the room.

How often do we take vacations or attend reunions, taking selfies and other photos, rather than living in the moment, where we might generate true joy?

Guillaume Duchenne du Boulogne would have known if members of the wedding party were faking those smiles. A pioneer neurophysiologist back in the 1860s, he used electrical stimulation to distinguish between the genuine smile that turns up at the corners and the toothy smile that is produced for the camera. He believed that human beings can detect the honest signal of a real smile.

Life itself is expression. Holding back becomes a language — and no matter how much we tell ourselves we’re being professional, there is nothing attractive about a blank face. Faking a smile sends a subtle message, too.

Rediscover your own spontaneity. Make genuine connections. Smile. We're watching.