By Breanna Draxler

June 12, 2013

Smiling comes in two distinct forms: genuine and polite. The genuine kind are those that result from a friend showing you a hilarious new Internet video. These smiles are spontaneous and indicative of pleasure. Polite smiles, on the other hand, are the ones reserved for the awkward encounters with your coworker at the coffee machine. You don’t want to be rude, but you’re not actually enjoying the exchange. You just feel like you have to go through the motions.

Whether or not a smile is genuine, it is generally a reciprocal social action. When a person smiles at you, you usually smile back. And more often than not, you respond with the same kind of smile you perceive. Socially, the smiles have different meanings: a genuine smile is a social reward, whereas the polite version is a social obligation. Since people learn to anticipate rewards, researchers wanted to know if people anticipate rewarding smiles.

To figure this out, the researchers conducted a study. Thirtyfive participants learned to play a button-pressing game in which correct answers were rewarded with a smiling animated face. Two of the faces gave fake smiles, and two gave real smiles. While playing this game, participants were hooked up to an electromyography machine which monitored the neurons responsible for contracting smile muscles.

This test showed that participants’ facial muscles started contracting even before the genuine smile was given — confirming that we’re subconsciously prepared for the real thing, according to the findings published in Psychological Science. Keep that in mind next time you try to fool your angry landlord with phony politesse.

(www.discovermagazine.com. Adaptado.)

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