adopted from 'Emotionomics' by Dan Hill
The presence of a social smile may simply reveal a degree of enjoyment that falls short of spirited, joyful happiness. Consumers or employees who are pleased with what they’ve received may nevertheless not experience an exalted happiness. That’s because, while their expectations were met, they were not exceeded. How they then respond to being satisfied, but not thrilled, could involve the exhibiting of a social smile. But if there’s pressure to be happy about the raise a boss has just given you, for example, the employee may gamely put a happy face on the situation. Or a prospect put off by a salesperson’s overly aggressive style may exhibit a social smile to hide the fact that the deal is headed south.
In those cases, a degree of deception is involved. And later on, the manager or salesperson may wish he or she had been able to tell from the other party’s facial expressions that the end was near. But alas, there is no one muscle movement that categorically reveals deception.
What better example for deceit than the classic clown face?
Painted to look like it’s always full of smiles, one glance beneath the makeup can dispel the myth of continuous merriment.
Facial coding does much the same thing by gleaning true, unfiltered, positive or negative emotional reactions.
Bear in mind that while Adolf Hitler practised his speeches in front of a mirror to test his accompanying expressions, most of us aren’t that deliberate. All of us can adequately guard against ‘two-faced’ people whose smiles aren’t the real thing by being alert to a few, basic situations
or patterns.
or patterns.
In particular, be alert to a polite, masking smile in situations where:
- It doesn’t involve the whole face. The cheeks will lie flat and still and the eyes don’t narrow as they do during a genuine smile.
- It lingers too long. A true smile tends to fade around the four-second mark. A false smile may run from five to ten seconds.
- It has odd timing. A deceitful smile tends to start or end too abruptly or arrive too early or late. A smile may also be deceitful if what the person is saying and the expression are out of sync.
- It’s asymmetrical and much more pronounced on just one side of the face. That happens because the smile is likely to have been consciously delivered.
- Finally, watch out for smiles given when the person’s face hints of other, darker emotions at or near the same time. In a case of mixed signals like happiness and anger, be careful not to discount the anger on display.
That last description of a deceitful smile involves what Ekman (1992) calls ‘leakage’. Basically, it amounts to unintended, fleeting glimpses of what the person is really feeling. On a related note, a micro-expression may happen because of ‘squelches’. These occur when a person interrupts his or her natural expression, usually to cover up a negative feeling with a smile. The squelch is something skilled politicians the world over attempt to master.
