You Can Probably Fake An Honest Smile – The Deliberate Duchenne Smile
Christopher Philip
Sarah Gunnery and colleagues, Northeastern University has found that producing a deliberate Duchenne smile characterized by crinkles in the corners of the eyes is entirely possible for some people.
It had been argued that the Duchenne smile is genuine and a spontaneous reflection of positive thoughts and emotions which is difficult or impossible to fake.
The smile is produced with the use of two specific muscles, the orbicularis oculi or cheek raiser which make crow’s feet at the outer corner of the eyes, as well as the zygomatic major muscle that extends out of the mouth, also called the lip corner pullers.
In the study, two tasks were asked of subjects. One involved role-playing which was designed to measure use of Duchenne smiles and the other, an imitation task used to measure the ability of a person to consciously flex the muscles used in the Duchenne smile.
In the role-play task, participants were asked to smile while enacting specific scripts, three of which were faked and three genuine. In the imitation task, the participants were given photographs of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles, and were asked to imitate them.
The results showed that a minority of people did have the ability to make a Duchenne smile deliberately.
Specifically, when the participants were instructed to smile in the role-play task, 28% of the smiles were Duchenne. When broken down by task type, it was found that under the “genuine happiness” condition, the success rate was 31% rather than 24% under the “fake happiness” condition. As expected, independent raters also found the Duchenne smiles to be more genuine.
In the imitation task, it was found that 71% were able to successfully replicate the photograph of the Duchenne smile and 69% were able to imitate the non-Duchenne smile.
Overall, the smile intensity was correlated best with perceived genuineness. In other words, the more intense were the smiles, the more genuine other’s perceived them to be.
Say the researchers in their paper, “We, like other recent investigators, questioned this assumption [i.e. not being able make a Duchenne smile] and showed that a nontrivial number of participants could willfully produce a Duchenne smile when acting out role-plays that conveyed certain social messages, and a greater percentage deliberately produced a Duchenne smile when imitating a photographed Duchenne smile.”
Thus, while individual differences exist with respect to the ability to make the Duchenne smile under fake circumstances, most can still produce an honest smile with some effort.
This is especially so when a photograph of an honest smile is provided.
So the results are quite instructive; with a bit of practice, and a solid example of Duchenne smile, it’s likely that one can imitate the “honest” expression. When done with intensity, the smile is also likely to boost the perception of genuineness.
Image Credit: Emergency Brake
Resources
Gunnery, Sarah D.; Judith A. Hall and Mollie A. Ruben. The Deliberate Duchenne Smile: Individual Differences in Expressive Control. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. 2019. 37:29–41. DOI 10.1007/s10919-012-0139-4