Are you smiling right now? You shou

Are you smiling right now? You should be!
There's a lot more to a smile than you may know. It's far more than just a signal we use to show that we're happy. In fact, there are even quite a few benefits to smiling often! Before we get to that, first let's look at the background of the human grin.
Grinning is a facial expression that scientists have deemed as universal. That means that all humans can recognize the meaning behind a smile, regardless of upbringing or culture.
Scientists aren't fully sure how the smile entered its way into evolution. One of the closest alternatives we can see in the animal kingdom is baring of the teeth, showing hostility and dominance.
Charles Darwin did offer an interesting theory to how that teeth-baring turned into what we consider a grin. He compared our smiling to something seen in monkeys known as a "fear grin".
This is a supposedly a monkey's way of showing its lack of hostility towards another. Instead of baring its teeth, the monkey shows its teeth in a grin to communicate friendliness of sorts. This doesn't display hostility, but instead shows trustworthiness and welcoming.
This theory is not yet fully accepted as the origin of the human smile, but it seems relatively accurate from a scientific standpoint.
In a world where we have to trust and rely on others, smiling is enormously important. In both monkeys and humans, a healthy grin shows a lack of hostility and communicates friendliness.
Of course, the sincerity of smiling has long since been compromised by salesmen and politician. The human brain was always thought to be somewhat skilled at determining which smiles are real and which are fake, but a recent study by Sarah Gunnery has found that this isn't quite the case.
Their study focused on one smile in the particular, known as the Duchenne smile. A Duchenne smile is one that not only involves using the mouth muscles (zygomatic major) but also uses muscles in the corners of the eyes (orbicularis oculi).
This creates a squinty eyed grin that scientists say is the most genuine smile which we can have. Duchenne smiles also take about half a second to spread across the face, an important note to observe when determining a smile's genuineness.
For all of its perceived genuineness, the study showed that a Duchenne smile can still be faked without our minds being able to notice about 80% of the time. However, even with fake smiles there are still certain benefits which can't be ignored.

The Benefits of Smiling
Scientists have known for a while that emotions can have pretty deep effects on our physical bodies. Likewise, happiness and the grinning that tends to accompany it are no exceptions. Here's a list of some of the most impactful benefits of a smile.

It Makes You Happier
Your mind makes your lips curl into a smile when you're happy. This is an obvious fact that we're aware of from childhood. However, it's not just a one-way street; you can also make yourself feel happy by smiling.
This happens because your brain picks up feedback from your facial muscles, including the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi. It associates the use of these muscles with happiness, so if even if you flex them yourself the brain will release the feel-good hormone dopamine.
This means that you can help improve your mood in all situations, including stressful ones, by forcing yourself to smile. Try it now, attempt to fake a genuine Duchenne smile.
You suddenly feel pretty good, right? Or at the very least you don't feel bad. The feeling doesn't last forever, and it certainly won't cure depression, but it can help lift your mood a bit when needed. You're effectively tricking your brain and taking control of your own emotions.
Beware about smiling at certain things, however. Studies have found that participants who smiled at gory or disturbing images have a better emotional reaction to them, but are also looked upon as inappropriate by others. So while smiling may help you relieve stress after witnessing something horrible, others won't look upon you very kindly.

People Will See You as Likeable
What do you think when you first meet someone and they offer you a cool, confident smile?
You like them, of course! They come across as confident and pleasant.
We are simply hardwired to like those who smile at us. This isn't to say that people who constantly smile are the best in the world; I've met some super-positives who could annoy the crap out of anyone. But we do tend to view people who smile often as more likeable than those who do not.

It Makes Others Smile Too
Ever have someone offer you a big, genuine, cheerful grin? It's hard as hell to not smile back when somebody genuinely smiles at you first. This goes back to the evolutionary roots; if one animal offers no hostility, the other must reciprocate or else may be seen as hostile and negative.
This means that if someone smiles at you, your brain often instinctively makes you smile back so you're not seen as hostile or untrustworthy. Its like Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan; "all men must drop their arms at once for their to be peace". Similarly, everybody in a given situation usually reciprocates a smile (sometimes a fake smile) when they want there to be a positive feeling.
A 1991 study by Hinz and Tomhave found that only around 50% of people will return a smile when smiled at first. What about the other half?
My personal experience has found that some people are just intentionally hostile towards others. They will not reciprocate a smile when smiled at first, and they may never smile at all. They simply don't care about the negative, hostile feelings that they're putting across. On that note...

Smiles Affect Others' Perceptions of Us
In regards to my example above, how well are these unsmiling people perceived by others?
I don't know about you, but I don't look upon them too fondly.
Our facial expression has a huge effect on how we are perceived by others. For example, take this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby".
"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
That's quite a lot to be said for just a smile. It displays not just your mood, but your whole internal outlook. It can show confidence, charm, debonair, and respectability all at once.
My advice to the world is to be more like Jay Gatsby in this sense. Let your smile say more than words can, let its confidence overwhelm those who see it. Based on the quote above, that's a pretty damn good first impression to make before ever really meeting someone.
There was a recent Canadian study by Tracy and Beall on the effects of emotion and attractiveness. The study found that men rated women as more attractive when they smiled, but that women found happy men less attractive than proud or sulky men. The assumption made by everyone after the experiment was immediately "smiling makes men appear less attractive!"
I don't know about you, but to me that sounds wrong. Perhaps women don't find men who look constantly overjoyed very attractive, but I think it's unfair to complete criminalize smiling. Not every smile is emasculating, and in my opinion there are some smiles which can work more magic than any words can.
After all, there are 19 different types of documented smiles, all of which display slightly different things. I think that what you let your smile say about you has the biggest effect on whether or not somebody finds you attractive.
So don't offer an Urkel smile; you'll be perceived like Urkel, and you probably don't want that! Instead consciously understand what you want your smile to say about you and work to make it so.

Smiles Can Save You From Embarrassment
If you're caught in an embarrassing situation, what's the best thing to do?
"Run away awkwardly and cry, of course!"
Certainly not! The best thing that you can do in an embarrassing situation is to simply smile. It can create empathy from those around you and save you from looking like a total fool.
Smiling causes others to feel a certain leniency when viewed after witnessing a mistake. It displays a trustworthiness (even when faked) that often causes the human mind to downplay whatever the blunder was.
Plus, it is as they say; better to laugh with the crowd than to be laughed at by the crowd. So laugh along with your embarrassing incident, it's probably funny! See our article on Learning From Your MIstakes for more.

Smiling Will Make You Live Forever
That is possibly the most disgustingly cliched header that I have ever written. It sounds like something out of a two-year old's cartoon...
However, one study did find that lifespan was positively correlated with smiling. In a study by Abel & Kruger it was found that baseball players who had smiled on their card pictures had outlived their stony-faced teammates by an average of seven years.
Of course, one card picture does not determine a man's life. So perhaps this isn't the most convincing study ever conducted, but it certainly sounds nice.
Smile, and live... forever!


There's still a lot of research to be done on the definitive effects of smiling. For right now, though, we here at the New Renaissance Man can solidly state that it is to your advantage to smile.
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