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Fars News.com reports on the influence a smile can have on the observer’s perception of that person’s state of mind.  People deduce other’s states of mind greatly from the facial expressions they employ.

One of the longest standing questionable smiles is Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa.  Is she happy, is she sad, what lies behind her smile?

Spanish researchers found out how much Mona Lisa’s smile truly confuses our emotion recognition and has most of us perceiving a face as happy even if it’s not.

The question being asked is, Is the Human Brain Capable of Identifying a Fake Smile?

David Beltrán Guerrero, researcher at the University of La Laguna explains,  “The smile plays a key role in recognizing others´ happiness. But, as we know, we are not really happy every time we smile.  In some cases, a smile merely expresses politeness or affiliation.  In others, it may even be a way of hiding negative feelings and incentives, such as dominance, sarcasm, nervousness or embarrassment.“

The authors of the study, employed faces with both smiling mouths and eyes expressing non-happiness emotions and faces in both eyes and mouth express the same emotional state.

According the the article, the objective was to discover how fare the smile skews the recognition of ambiguous expressions making the observer identify those faces with happiness even though they are accompanied by eyes that express a different feeling.

The researchers found that when the task is purely perceptive — like the detection of facial features — the smile has a very strong influence, to the extent that differences between ambiguous expressions (happy mouth and non-happy eyes) and genuinely happy expressions (happy mouth and eyes) are not distinguished.  However, when the task involved categorizing expressions, that is recognizing if they are happy, sad or any other emotion, the influence of the smile weakens.

However, the influence of the smile disappears in emotional assessment (when someone is asked to assess whether a facial expression is positive or negative),  “A smile can cause us to interpret a non-happy expression as happy, except when we are involved in the emotional assessment of said expression,“ Beltran highlights.

The reason for these discrepancies…A smile sometimes leading to the incorrect categorization of an expression is related to its high visual “salience” (its attention-grabbing capacity) and its almost exclusive association with the emotional state of happiness.

Test your ability to distinguish between genuine and social smiles: take our smile quiz!

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Social media is dominating the structure of human lives.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc are popular all over the world.  People “Check-In” on their friends, their enemies and people they don’t even talk to anymore.

Why do we impulsively “check-in” on people we don’t interact with especially the individuals with which we’ve had a falling out?

The New York Times has the answer – Hate Reading.  According to the article Hate Reading, mostly of social media sites, provides us with “satisfaction from fury-fueled engagement with someone who should theoretically not provide it.”

Katie J. M. Baker, a writer for Jezebel commented, “I usually hate-read alone, late at night when I’m procrastinating, drunk, bored or all three,” she wrote. “When I finally walk away from my computer, I feel like I’ve just binged on a butter-sogged bag of popcorn before the movie even started: I’m slightly nauseated, but still can’t help licking my fingers for more fatty flavor.”

Jillian Sanders is also a self confessed hate reader.  She frequently visits the Facebook page of a high-school classmate she hasn’t talked to in years.

“I don’t know why it infuriates me,” said Sanders, 31, a freelance book publicist. “She’ll often describe, say, how her favorite ice cream flavor makes her happy all day. I feel like she’s lying. I get upset watching people post pictures of a rainbow that says ‘I believe in magic’ — upset that they’re projecting that image and thinking others are falling for it, or that they’re falling for it themselves. Maybe I’m just jealous.”

A Stanford study suggested we underestimate negative emotion in others’ lives (a misjudgment exacerbated by the cheery cast of most social-media personae).  Alexander Jordan, assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth said, “Some research suggests that downward emotional comparisons can improve people’s well-being.”

He went on to comment in an interview, “It’s when a person’s typically rosy self-view is temporarily threatened that self-enhancement processes, such as finding people to ‘hate’ online, are triggered.  Research has also shown that people who are chronically unhappy or low in self-esteem are more concerned about social comparisons, upward or downward, in general.”

 Come On Let’s Admit it, Do YOU Hate Read?