“It Ain’t Necessarily So,”* that the beholder of a smile is happy. Nor is happiness always reflected in a smile. *(from the opera Porgy and Bess 1935, George and Ira Gershwin)
What is happiness anyway, contentment, joy, giddiness, bliss? At any rate, happiness and smiles are probably correlated, or related, but one does not really cause the other.
However, I do think it’s proven scientifically that if you force a smile, certain happy hormones, or endorphins kick in as if you meant it. It apparently doesn’t matter if you’re faking a smile or if you’re genuinely pleased about something, thus cracking a smile; fluffy chemicals supercharge your being.
The thinking is that when your facial muscles form a smile, neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, associated with positive emotion, are released. This is called a facial feedback hypothesis, and over time, this feedback trend can lead to genuine feelings.
“When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you” (1928). I think smiles are truly contagious. I’m sure it has been proven in various experiments over time. It’s hard to be a sourpuss when someone smiles at you. But then there are always exceptions.
Have you ever wondered why people didn’t smile for photographs in the 19th and twentieth centuries? The usual answer is that with long exposure times unlike today’s instant photography, people just couldn’t hold a smile for a whole minute. Try it.
I know, while we’re waiting for the whole family to pose, my smile grows more and more fake the longer I hold it. So, people didn’t smile for those photos. It all began with painted portraits for which people sat for hours, posing.
However, cultural history also tells us that perceptions of smiling have changed over time. Smiling for photographs was considered poor etiquette and undignified by the upper classes. Only the poor, drunk, lewd and folks of the low class smiled in photographs.
This was until the 1920s when actors in motion pictures expressed a whole range of emotions. After this time, photographers and painters alike began to expect at least a little bit of a smile from their subjects. “Say cheese.”
The yellow smiley face symbol, created by graphic designer Harvey Ball in 1963 has become a universal symbol for happiness. I guess the smiley face was the parent of today’s plethora of emoji’s including the smiley face, which demonstrate how we’re feeling.
For most of us, our faces are the blank slates upon which we display what we’re feeling on the inside. I saw the perfect saying on social media recently, “I don’t need a Mood Ring, I have a Face!”
When we grow up, we learn how to behave and how to think, including how to show our emotions. People read emotions differently to some degree, depending on how, when, or where we were brought up.
However, the ability to read emotions from faces is pretty much a universal skill. Even people from different cultural backgrounds interpret facial expressions about the same.
There can be a dozen things going wrong with you and when someone asks, “how are you,” you usually smile and at least say, “okay.” I saw this on social media recently and it pretty much explains this phenomenon, “I smile and act like nothing is wrong. It’s called dealing with life and staying strong.”
In today’s world, you can hit delete quickly if you’re not happy with your smile. That makes me a tad happy.
I’ve been sorting thousands of family pictures of old and oh dear, some of them really should not have been kept for posterity, really. Some amateur photographers, usually “mom,” took pictures without considering that their subject wasn’t framed in their best self.
Thus, the selfie was born. I personally think this was because of all those horrid pictures mom took and kept in an album or twenty. The selfie is redemptive.
A crooked smile, delete. A triple chin angle, delete. I now hate that shirt, delete. Finally, my best smile, best angle, good hair day, tummy is tucked as much as it can be. It’s a selfie at its best and I’m posting it on social media.
You’ve got something to smile about, I know it. Just ponder a moment, and I’ll bet you’ll smile just in time for Thanksgiving.