Mind Moves:Smiling is a human signal. It serves a primitive survival function. It is a key element in bonding.
It is one of the strongest infant signals, the glue that entices and enthrals new parents, keeping them close and rewarding them for their presence. For who can leave a baby's beguiling smile to attend to anything else?
Crying may summon parents to their baby's side but the smile retains them. Once smiled at parents are smitten.
Smiling encourages care taking. It helps children to engage with other children. It is disarming in adolescents, reassuring between adults and well established in older people whose smile lines map their lives. This is why radical cosmetic surgery is so disconcerting: it contorts human expression sending contradictory signals to observers.
While smiling is usually associated with positive intent, not all smiles are positive social signals. The communicative complexity of the smile means that interpreting the nuances is a crucial skill. For there may be little lip variation between the grimace, the greeting and the grin but aeons of primitive psychological information separate them.
Smiling is the advance signal of the person who is approaching: usually indicating that the anticipated encounter will be cordial, convivial and sociable. This is one of the most common functions of the smile. The smile is also a signal of recognition as one approaches a friend: before speech can be heard the smile can be seen.
Couples who are irritated with each other in a public space may conduct their whispered arguments with fixed smiles that are a social attempt to conceal the nature of their exchange. But the smiles face outwards and not towards each other. In this way the action of smiling, the nature of the smile, its direction and its duration all send important messages about relationships.
Smiles may be formal, friendly, flattering or flagrantly flirtatious. Smiling may be haughty and autocratic as if a favour has been bestowed.
Smiles may be dismissive or malicious, simpering or superior, shy, supercilious or conciliatory. There are sly, snide, sneering, sarcastic and spiteful smiles. There are smiles that are contemptuous, casual or cruel. There are smiles that are warm, affirming and supportive: that gather us into the group.
When we receive a smile we respond emotionally to what we see. Psychological distress occurs when there is a discrepancy between a person's facial expression and tone of voice. Dissonance confuses us. The difference between teeth displayed in humour and teeth gritted in anger, while almost immeasurable physically, is enormous in emotional terms.
Smiles may be conspiratorial when exchanged between two people in communicative collusion against a third. They are powerful weaponry in the non-verbal arsenal of bullying.
Smiles are the stuff of filmic close-ups: the visual information that identifies the villain's smile of subterfuge and deceit. This powerful filmic mechanism of contradictory signals is what makes such images chilling.
When the scoundrel smiles all is lost. Film director Alfred Hitchcock resourced this incongruity between humour and cruelty using it to powerful effect.
Children are acute observers of smiles: they notice dissonance between signals. They check, not just the smiling person's mouth, but their eyes. For eyes and mouth together determine the veracity of a smile.
The coy smile sends another contradictory message, being both bashful and invitational simultaneously. The wry smile betrays cynicism, a sardonic signal that may be scathing in its brevity.
The amused smile signals inner laughter whereas the bemused smile indicates inner bafflement, uncertainty about the validity, reality or normality of what one is seeing and a level of disbelief in it. Beloved of candid camera footage are these perplexed, bemused and secret smiles of people confronted with odd or aberrant behaviour.
When we watch such footage, we in turn, smile empathically knowing that our response would be similar if we were in that situation.
The brave smile signals determination to overcome all obstacles. The smile of resignation shows that the contest is over. The grateful smile is all the appreciation most people ever need. The gentle smile is healing.
Smiling has a role, a function and a purpose in human interaction. From a psychological perspective the impact of encountering people who greet with a smile rather than a frown, with humour rather than discontent, and with affability rather than anger, is far more significant than is consciously realised.
The facial expressions, even of an unknown passersby, can invade our day. We live, not as isolated creatures, but as part of communities whose general temperament and temper influences our own humour and sense of well-being.
Which is why the children's smiling rhyme may be a useful mental health prescription: that is to smile a while and while you smile another smiles and soon there's miles and miles of smiles and life's worthwhile because you smile.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is a director of psychology and an Irish Times health columnist.