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October
16, 2002:
Smiles
Interview
with Dr. Marianne LaFrance, Professor of Psychology at Yale
University
Mike
Carruthers:
What exactly is a smile?
Dr.
Marianne LaFrance:
It's actually a fairly complicated answer. Most people think
a smile is something that occurs in the mouth, when the outer
corners of the mouth come upwards.
Dr. Marianne
LaFrance, professor of psychology at Yale
University, has been studying smiles for a long time.
Actually,
a genuine smile is a combination of what happens in the mouth,
but also what happens around the eyes. There's a particular
muscle that circumferences the eyes and causes crow's feet,
bagging, and wrinkles below the eyes, and that's how we know
that a real smile is happening.
It's almost
impossible to fake a genuine smile because you can't voluntarily
contract those muscles around the eyes. And there are other
ways to spot a fake smile.
For example,
smiles that stay on the face a little too long or occur too
quickly are fake smiles. Smiles that occur more on one side
of the face-the Bruce Willis effect, as I call it-than on both
sides of the face are more likely to be posed or put on.
Interestingly,
Dr. LaFrance was a consultant on getting the Pepperidge Farm
goldfish cracker to smile.
Actually,
it was an interesting engineering feat because to stamp on a
smile on the cracker so that the cracker doesn't break and it
doesn't look like a smirk and that has some resemblance to a
real smile, actually turns out to be not an uncomplicated task.
Tomorrow,
interesting differences between how men and women smile. I'm
Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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