what if humans stopped smiling ? essay
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"The evolution of smiles is opaque and, as with many evolutionary accounts of social behavior, fraught with just-soism. Among human babies, however, the 'tooth-baring' smile is associated less with friendship than with fright--which, one might argue, is related to the tooth-baring threats of baboons. On the other hand, a non-toothy, not-so-broad-but-open-lipped smile is associated with pleasure in human infants. Somehow we seem to have taken the fright-threat sort of smile and extended it to strangers as a presumably friendly smile. Maybe it is not as innocent as it seems.
"All cultures recognize a variety of mouth gestures as indexes of inner emotional states. As in our own culture, however, smiles come in many varieties, not all of them interpreted as friendly."
Frank McAndrew, professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has done extensive research on facial expressions. He answers as follows:
"Baring one's teeth is not always a threat. In primates, showing the teeth, especially teeth held together, is almost always a sign of submission. The human smile probably has evolved from that.
"In the primate threat, the lips are curled back and the teeth are apart--you are ready to bite. But if the teeth are pressed together and the lips are relaxed, then clearly you are not prepared to do any damage. These displays are combined with other facial features, such as what you do with your eyes, to express a whole range of feelings. In a lot of human smiling, it is something you do in public, but it does not reflect true 'friendly' feelings--think of politicians smiling for photographers
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Answer:
Smiling is a fundamental part of how we interact with other people, but what if you were not able to do it?
I miss smiling because it’s one of the handiest utensils in the communication drawer and my mask has locked it away. Yes, it’s just a facial expression: a deployment of the zygomaticus muscles, sometimes authentic, sometimes a placeholder because the real emotion we’re feeling is best not expressed. But as humans, we learn at the age of approximately 42 days that smiling is a useful way of getting people to feel good about themselves and therefore us. (The “world smiles with you” thing actually works–for babies.)
We continue to refine the way we use that smile to communicate information–from “you’re here!” to “you’re cute” to “you’re not meant to take that seriously, although you also kind of are”–until we no longer have teeth. And now, suddenly, those skills, all that practice, are useless. We have lost our favorite communication gizmo just when we need more ways to connect than ever.
Trying to interact with other humans without being able to smile is the facial equivalent of communicating via text message; it’s easy to be misunderstood. Your expression and words lack context. People wonder: Are you wincing at me? Are you grinding your jaw? Do you just have a lot of crow’s-feet? Was what you said an insult or a joke?
Her studies have shown that it’s harder to tell the difference between affiliative smiles and dominant ones if you can’t see the lower half of the face. In those situations, people have to rely on other clues. She gives the example of walking a dog that suddenly barks at a passerby. A quick look at an unmasked person’s face will confirm whether the passerby is smiling because he thinks he’s much better with his dog than you are or smiling because his dog is also occasionally silly. Behind a mask, this distinction is not so clear.
It almost never helps a situation to tell people to smile, so I won’t, but I’m going to keep beaming, even if it can’t be seen and sometimes is not entirely authentic. A fake smile, after all, is often given with good intentions, just as a mask is sometimes worn not to hide but to protect.
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