Say cheese! Why we all love a big smile

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"The muscle of kindness," the orbicularis oculi, crinkles the eyes with crow's feet. It flexes alongside the zygomaticus major, which pulls back the corners of the mouth, when a person forms a genuine smile. When the eyes sit dead even as a person grins, something is afoot – the smile is social, not spontaneous.

French physiologist G.B.A. Duchenne de Boulogne chanced upon the muscular map of these two smiles in the 1860s, a discovery now traced by Marianne LaFrance in Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex and Politics.

Drawing on literature, anthropology, medicine, computer science and her own research at Yale University and Boston College, Dr. LaFrance examines how smiles move others. She writes of babies enticing supportive adults with googly smiles weeks after birth. In adulthood, the genders split: Testosterone-loaded men rarely smile widely, preferring a wolfish grin instead (think John Wayne). Women, meanwhile, boast a far stronger zygomaticus muscle – the social order dictates they smile or be written off as chilly, Dr. LaFrance argues.

Beyond gender, smiles have accents: Brits will often bare both the upper and lower teeth in a grin (Prince Charles, anyone?); traditional Pakistani brides won't smile at their weddings (the occasion is solemn); and the Japanese tend to focus on the eyes, not the teeth, as evidenced by their unique smiley emoticon: (ˆ_ˆ)

Dr. LaFrance also casts a glance on service with a smile, from cold-calling telemarketers who have mirrors attached to their computers reminding them to "smile down the phone" to the nice waitress who puts a smiley face on your bill and gets a heftier tip in return. The author also writes about the toll taken by the daylong smile, from flight attendants who go into "robot" mode after their shifts to female employees at Safeway who filed a grievance after male shoppers kept mistaking the supermarket chain's stringent smile policy as a come-on.

Dr. LaFrance spoke with The Globe and Mail from Cape Neddick, Me., about how smiles "work their magic without anyone being the wiser."

"The world," you write, "is awash with clichés and beliefs about smiling."

They all stem from a basic notion that smiling is simple, straightforward, unambiguous and easy to decipher. Maybe the most controversial belief is that one doesn't have to learn how to smile, or that smiles are universal. The research now strongly shows that we actually learn facial expressions. Culture, gender, race, ethnicity and social class all have a hand in moulding the basic mechanics into something that we all recognize.

You describe babies experimenting with smiles in utero and then soon after birth, their first social manipulation: "They smile for their supper and for other comforts as well."

Before five weeks, babies can show all kinds of smiles, but they seem to have no connection to what's going on in their external or internal worlds. They appear mostly to be a kind of impulse. The social smile is the first time there is a real engagement with something outside. At a few weeks verging on three months, the smile is starting to be done deliberately with a mind toward getting something.

Emotions generate an expression on a face and then "display rules" fine-tune it, like "that last check you make in the mirror before going out the door."

Facial expressions are a nice example of evolution and culture. Certain facial expressions are applauded and endorsed and others are frowned upon and maybe even punished. The display rules are socialization, the process of learning under what circumstances and for how long it is appropriate or ill-advised to show this expression.

To say spontaneous smiles are genuine and deliberate smiles are fake is oversimplifying the matter, you write.

There's a stance held by many that if something is done deliberately then it is suspect. But in fact we expect people to smile deliberately in lots of circumstances: When you go into a high-end store, you see a salesperson as unfriendly if they didn't smile. We expect deliberate smiles, but we con ourselves into thinking there's something natural about it. Most of the smiles we encounter in the course of a day are probably social smiles; the so-called genuine smiles are actually fairly rare. Social, "fake" smiles are WD-40 substances that keep things smooth.

When did service with a smile become the norm?

It appears to have long been the norm in sales. When people could choose between product A and product B, then salespeople had to do something else to make their sale more likely. The smile became part of that. The service industries didn't really start to happen until the 1960s, and that's when we got lots of people whose sole job is customer service.

This involves "emotional labour," employees managing their feelings into a display for customers.

Arlie Hochschild, the now-retired sociologist from Berkeley, was the first to devote attention to people in that burgeoning service industry. She recognized that the expressed pleasure to be of service was now a required characteristic in many positions. It made people express things they did not feel, and didn't want to express feeling – "These people mean nothing to me, and now I'm required to greet them with a big smile on my face and say, 'Hi, can I help you? What terrific shoes,' or, 'Fabulous briefcase.' " Hochschild found out mostly by interviews that people who did this a lot were just getting emotionally burned out.

What about at the office, where people smile over small talk to show that they are team players?

A smile is one of the rudimentary ways in which we identify others as being "us" or "them." In work settings, it's the best possible way to indicate, "I got you," "I agree," but also, "He's an idiot." Facial expressions are efficient and relatively non-accountable, for other people who want to challenge us.

You argue that smiles are highly gendered: Social psychologists see a smile as the default facial expression for women and an impassive expression as the default for men. "Men like to see women smile," you write.

There's lots of research that shows that if you show video, pictures or live examples of women smiling to men and men smiling to women, there is a remarkably universal response by most young men to see a woman's smile as flirtatious. When women see a smile on a man's face, they're more likely to generate a number of possible responses: He's charming; he's friendly; he wants something; he's coming on to me, he must be somebody I know.

What about catcalls and smiles, men entreating women to bare their teeth on the street?

Somebody says to you, "Come on, honey, give us a smile." When you unpack that experience, it's someone you don't know telling you what to do with your body. Smiles are so important in the social order, they suggest to some men that the sexual dimension is at least viable in some minimal sense.

Aside from the telltale crinkly eyes, how do you tell a real smile from a fake one?

Fake smiles tend to come onto the face very fast. When nobody's paying attention again, they leave the face very fast. Genuine smiles tend to come on the face more languidly; they reach their apex in a gradual manner. But if a smile stays on the face too long, that's another sign it's fake.

You're smiling in the photo of your book jacket. It looks real.

That's the wrong photograph, I should point out. I probably intended to show something remotely pleasant. This is something I've never mastered. I think I'm pretty good at detecting what's going on with other people's faces, but with my own, I'm an open book.

This interview has been edited and condensed.