It's All In a Smile

Most researchers agree that facial expressions, such as smiling, are innate, not just something babies learn to do by watching the people around them. That's why athletes that are sightless still smile when they win a race or succeed at some other type of athletic endeavor. It's also the reason why we instinctively smile when someone smiles at us.

Evidence also suggests that people who smile also tend to be happier and more successful in life than those that don't. The smile, as one researcher puts it, is "our most important symbol of cooperation." Using Facial Action Coding (FACS) researchers have been able to catalogue more than 3,000 meaningful facial expressions. One of these, the Ducheene smile where the cheek muscles lift the corners of the mouth and the muscles around the eyes contract, causing a crow's feet wrinkling, often with then outer corners of the eyebrows drawing down, has come to be regarded as the one smile that reveals genuine happiness.

In studies of happily married couples (whatever that may be) when they greeted each other at the end oft he day they tended to show Ducheene type smiles. Unhappily married couples just didn't! Now don't start looking at each other too closely but a smile of contempt, according to these very same researchers, with one corner of the mouth lifting higher than the other, reliably predicted divorce.

The powerful need for a smile has become increasingly more important with our reliance on email, teleconferencing and other substitutes for face to face meetings. We even use such symbols as :) to express a smile in emails and :( to show our dismay. Software manufacturers have decided to help us with this issue by developing avatars, digital stand-ins, that are capable of expressing programmable emotions.

Well, the moral of the story seems to be that a smile really matters. It can make you feel better and make other feel better as well. For over thiry years we havehelped many patients regain the smiles they had during their youth, lost due to accidents or even loss of teeth. If you've lost your smile give us a call. We're here to help!

Excerpts from The Smithsonian Magazine August 2007