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Fake smiles spread no mood
The photo experiment
Researchers brought participants into a lab and showed them pictures of smiling people. For the genuine pictures, the subjects had been told to think of something that makes them happy when the photo was taken. For the others, people faked a smile. Everyone took a mood test before and after.
Everyone who saw the real happiness caught the mood, and their scores improved. Everyone who looked at the fake pictures had no mood change at all. The fakes did not make anyone feel worse.
What fakes do
Authentic happiness is the contagious kind, and a faked version makes a person less impactful and influential. It does no damage, though, so a polite fake smile to get through a day is fine, particularly toward someone the person hopes to find something in common with eventually.
What makes a genuine smile look different?
In the 1860s the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne used electrical stimulation to study facial muscles and noted that a real smile engages the muscle ring around the eye as well as the cheek. Paul Ekman later named that pattern the Duchenne smile. The eye muscle is harder to move on command than the cheek muscle, which is why it was long treated as a marker of real enjoyment. Later studies found some people can produce the eye contraction on purpose.
Why do smiles spread between people?
In 1982 Ulf Dimberg of Uppsala University recorded electrical activity in people's facial muscles while they looked at pictures of faces. Viewing happy faces raised activity in the cheek muscle used for smiling, and viewing angry faces raised activity in the frown muscle. A later study led by Dimberg found the same responses when the faces were flashed too briefly to be consciously seen. Psychologists call this automatic copying facial mimicry.
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