It is almost a cliché, even among Russian-Americans, to joke about how little Russians smile. But does that reflect differing happiness levels?

There is some evidence that Russians are less happy than Americans, but current research suggests that this is not due to huge underling differences. Instead, it can be better explained by differing cultural expectations. While Americans are encouraged to smile in public, Russians are strongly discouraged from doing so.

As Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto explains, Russians, like many collectivist societies, live under stricter expectations of emotional control. This is mostly true with strangers, as it helps to emphasize the differences between friends and strangers.

Despite the often frosty demeanor, Dr. Matsumoto emphasized that this does not mean the Russians can never be expressive. You just have to get to know them and wait for them to open up.

In fact, Dr. Matsumoto remarked “Once you’re drinking vodka shots together, they’re more expressive than anyone else.”

This may seem odd to many Americans, where we are encouraged to smile in everyday contexts, but our smiles seem quite strange to other cultures! Many Russians may see our expressiveness as a sign of a disingenuous attitude.

In our blog a few weeks ago, we discussed how Japanese culture encourages smiles in public and with strangers but still in different ways than Americans. Many people from Japan may smile to hide other emotions, rather than to express happiness or cordiality. This is notably different from Russians who will maintain a neutral expression in those contexts.

In the video below, Dr. Matsumoto chose to address a question submitted to us for National Smile Month: How can smiling boost one’s mood? This is actually true, and smiling helps boost our mood by interfacing with central physical and emotional processes in our brain.

Dr. Matsumoto describes these emotional processes as sort of a central command system which controls both the physical and psychological sides of our reactions. When we perceive something that triggers emotions, this central command then activates both types of reactions. One of these physical manifestations are facial expressions like smiles.

So, when we smile, we begin to activate that process. This tells our central command system that a part of our body is having an emotion that corresponds with that smile. This then activates similar processes related to smiling and associated emotions.

It is almost as though the smile tells our brain that something is wrong. We are smiling but not feeling happy, which isn’t how that relationship should work! Instead, the body can respond by actually making us happier, trying to correct the incongruence between emotion and smile.

He continued by elaborating on the idea of “emotional contagion.” Sometimes when another person is smiling, we will subconsciously find ourselves smiling and becoming happier. This can even happen when we look at advertisements! Thus, the social and emotional contagion can augment or start this same process of actually making us happier.

This need not work for everyone, but since 1980 this phenomenon has been studied by psychologists and found to be relatively common. This has even led empirical psychologists to use this as a technique to induce emotional reactions among participants.

Yet, in a word of caution, this would be very unlikely to counteract a strong countervailing emotion, like deep sadness. For instance, Dr. Matsumoto has found that people with depression will not be able to induce such a feeling of happiness.

We know that expressions differ across cultures, but an exploration of how we recognize smiles brings that observation to the forefront!

In a major 1993 study, Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto and Tsutomu Kudoh sought to explore the differences between how Americans and Japanese express and perceive smiles. This would reveal different cultural assumptions but also managed to demonstrate some potentially unexpected similarities.

Smiles are great places to begin this sort of work, as there are many kinds of smiles, and they all reveal different emotions or serve different social functions.

Initially, it is important to note that Americans and Japanese, when alone, tend to display very similar expressions of disgust, anger, fear, and sadness. These have been shown to be universal expressions, after all. However, this is not always true when others are present in the room, as many Japanese participants would smile despite being exposed to disgusting or sad imagery.

This would be explained by the fact that smiles have some negative connotations in Japan, where maturity is seen as rooted in stoicism and seriousness despite underlying emotions. Instead of expressing joy, smiles are often used for that purpose: to hid underling emotions rather than display them.

Because of their differing uses, therefore, it would stand to reason that people from different cultures would read into smiles differently. If we are accustomed to smiling during times when we are sad, we will be less likely to attribute happiness to other people who are smiling.

Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh sought to further disentangle these phenomena by exposing American and Japanese participants to images of both smiles and neutral faces. They were then asked to evaluate attractiveness, intelligence, friendliness, and sociability in each case. The overall goal of this study was to determine whether participant culture had a significant impact in these evaluations.

As it turns out, American judges rated smiling faces as more intelligent, and both judges rated smiling faces as being more sociable. While they agreed on the latter point, Americans rated smiling faces as being much more sociable than did their Japanese counterparts.

Both of these distinctions fit with the notion that Americans emphasize smiling more in social interactions. Americans would perceive the lack of a smile from a Japanese individual as a potentially negative sign, while Japanese may do the opposite.

Yet, despite these differences, both participants rated smiles as being more attractive. This may indicate the smiles reflect external characteristics rather than more internal notions like sociability and intelligence.

Still, it is clear that the smile is an incredibly important component towards effectively reading people, but we have to temper that with an understanding of cultural differences.