Grin and Bare it

By Mary Ann French

Boston Globe Magazine (Monday, September 11, 2000)

The farthest that a human can throw a javelin today - or perhaps could let fly a spear on the plains when we were a new species struggling to survive - just happens to equal the distance at which we can recognize a smile on the face of an approaching stranger. About 300 feet.

"That would have been critical when we were evolving on the savannah in Africa," says science writer Daniel McNeill, author of the book The Face. "Smiles essentially bind us together. If we were out there alone, we were going to get killed. If we were together, we survived and prospered. The smile is a critical device of cohesion that we tend to take for granted. If somebody smiles at you, you tend to smile back, you feel better toward them. It's an innate response."

As the schmaltzy song says: "Smile, and the world smiles with you."

It's "nature's peace symbol," according to Nancy Etcoff, a a professor of psychology at Harvard University who studies ways that the brain triggers and recognizes emotions. It signals that we come not as foes, even if not as friends. It's the most basic of our social lubricants, learned by infants in the first few months of life. It's our most frequently used facial expression. It signals that we're ready and willing to play ball.

So what does it mean when a city - the "hub of the universe," no less - proudly makes a point of not smiling?

Boston long has been known for its dry and crusty demeanor. It's an old legacy. "Customs but no manners," as a biographer of the Cabot family put it some time back. "If you smile at a Bostonian," says Thomas O'Connor, a noted Boston College historian, "his general reaction is, 'What do you want?' " To get the tone of that response just right, O'Connor turns his normally genial voice into a sneer.

"When I first arrived in Boston for graduate school, I couldn't believe how people seemed so incredibly surly and dour and grim," says psychologist Marianne LaFrance, who was raised in Toronto but was a longtime Boston-area resident before becoming a professor at Yale University two years ago, where she is studying gender-related aspects of the smile.

Each fall, Boston's storied aversion to bonhomie sparks similar reactions among thousands of new college students and their parents as they arrive here and get their first exposure to the local culture. What's amazing is how quickly these newcomers learn to fit in, says Northeastern University's Wilfred Holton, who has taught a class on the sociology of Boston for 25 years. "Just seeing what the rules of behavior are, nobody wants to be different," he says. "Maybe people get ugly stares if they're pleasant."

Now, granted, there are different kinds of smiles. They are not all genuine, frank, warm, open, or even benign. As Hamlet says, "One may smile and smile and be a villain." There is the social smile of the receiving line and the beseeching smile of the beauty queen contestant. There are studies of college yearbook photos that identify a particularly Southern smile. And there is Georgia State University psychologist James Dabbs's recent research finding that American men with high testosterone levels may smile least of all.

"On the average, men smile less than women," Dabbs says in his book Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior. "Smiling is not just a sign of good feeling. It is polite, disarming, and nonthreatening. It is a strategy that people with less power use more often than people with greater power. The sex difference is part of an ancient pattern in which women maintain community by smiling, and men maintain dominance by not smiling."

There are also certain pockets of our population where people of all kinds simply seem to smile too much, mechanically substituting saccharine for sweetness. We have enshrined the smiley face on a postage stamp, and the "Have a nice day" era just won't die. That's another story, however.

"Boston is too busy to smile," says Jack Levin, a sociology professor at Northeastern University. "We have the fastest pace of life of any city in the US. This is measured by the accuracy of clocks and watches and the speed at which people walk. In our city, time is money, and if you waste time, you're wasting money, so we don't have a lot of time for the social amenities."

They smile in your face
All the time they want to take your place
The back stabbers. ...
-THE O'JAYS

If a dog comes toward us with canines bared, we are instantly alarmed. Unsheathed teeth tend to trigger that kind of reaction throughout the animal kingdom. So how did we come to consider a show of pearlies to be a sign of politesse?

Some researchers believe that the human smile grew out of the primate's grimace, which apes use when they feel threatened or they want to show submission, and by males when they want sex.

Could it be that our smile is simply a civilizing mask for our own craven or conniving behavior? And would that somehow make Bostonians more noble because they don't disguise their true feelings and intentions?

It might also be that people here are acting more realistically by not grinning at every Tom, Dick, and Harry. "In any big town, you're surrounded by strangers," says McNeill. "It can become suspicious if you are showing signs of cohesion with people you may not see ever again in life."

Regional habits of facial expression evolve in curious ways that haven't been studied extensively. Perhaps it's like truisms, those cultural cliches supported by so much anecdotal evidence that we don't see the need to examine their roots and causes or current meanings and effects. Instead, we use them to characterize and judge one another.

"When New Englanders go south, Southerners want to know why they are so glum, and when Southerners go north, New Englanders want to know what's so funny," says LaFrance. And everyone knows that Southern Californians often seem as sunny as their weather. But overseas, LaFrance says, the French are convinced that "Americans are dopey because of their incessant smiling."

Body language and facial expression are age-old elements of human communication, but our understanding of them is just beginning to form. "Words haven't really evolved to replace the signs and signals and cues, only a few of which even make it to consciousness, like the smile," says David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington.

Charles Darwin laid out many of the fundamentals of nonverbal communication in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, after which the field was left largely fallow for a century. His work was ignored for a couple of reasons, says Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco, who devised a system of measuring and coding facial expressions that helped launch a renaissance in the field.

"Darwin said emotions are not unique to humans, that we share them with animals, which many people thought was extreme and wrong," Ekman says. "The animal rights people today would love Darwin, but even most pet lovers don't believe that the chickens and cows they eat have emotions."

The other reason why Darwin's ideas were rejected was that he was proclaiming the universality of mankind. "He was directly attacking the racists who said Europeans were superior because they had evolved from a more advanced progenitor," Ekman says, "and his proof was the universality of human expression, which he said shows that we all have a single progenitor."

While our common African origins have since become widely accepted, we have yet to understand how differently and variously we use the facial expressions that we so universally share. Flash on the smile, again. "It seems so clearly straightforward," says LaFrance, "yet it can occur where it shouldn't and not occur where it should. People smile when they're anything but happy and sometimes don't smile when they are in fact delighted." The "display rules" set by culture, class, gender, race, or age can cause people to showcase, suppress, or disguise their emotions.

Won't you smile awhile for me?
-HALL & OATES

O'Connor, who has collected reams of Boston's ethnic and cultural history, tells a story of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes traveling south in search of his son, the future Supreme Court jurist, who he had heard had been wounded on a battlefield during the Civil War. "After a long period of time, he suddenly saw him on a train," O'Connor says. "And instead of, as I would have done, letting out a yell and rushing forward and throwing your arms around him and so forth, he stopped and drew himself up erect and quietly walked forward and tapped his son on the shoulder from behind and said, 'How are you, boy?' "

The elder Holmes, who is credited with coining the term "Boston Brahmin," was exhibiting a mode of behavior and a masking of emotions that O'Connor says are deeply Anglo-Saxon and were passed down from early Massachusetts settlers.

"There was a natural suspicion on the part of the so-called Yankee, the peddler, who is almost a Dickensian skinflint type, that someone is going to cheat him, get the better of him," says O'Connor. "So therefore he plays his cards close to the vest, keeps his eyes down, doesn't look at you directly. He doesn't want to give anyone any sort of emotional edge over him. I find it interesting," O'Connor says, "because people talk so often about the differences between the Irish and the Yankees, and yet in this unwillingness to yield, to soften, to open up, they have some strange similarities."

While there is a stereotypical tendency to think of Irish people as being warm and forthcoming in many folksy ways, O'Connor says there is among the Boston Irish a xenophobic distrust that fostered these watchwords: "You don't tell anybody anything." You don't even make eye contact with strangers.

As early settlers displaced native inhabitants, it is understandable why the settlers would be wary. And because many Irish immigrants were persecuted and maltreated and were initially unsure of the extent of their freedoms and protections in this new land, it is easy to see how they might tend to be tight-lipped in public. However, others of the immigrant groups that helped form Boston's rich cultural fabric may have adopted the local demeanor as a means of fitting in. And in doing so, they may have picked up on behavioral cues that have outlived their causes.

In that event, Bostonians who come across as surly probably do not consciously choose to present such a front. "Habits learned early in life don't necessarily reflect how a person actually feels in the present," says Ekman. "They may have been brought up, as were their parents and as were their parents, not to manifest the smile. And since everybody is used to it, nobody notices it."

Furthermore, Boston is still very much a city of neighborhoods and tightknit communities, and the amount of smiling that goes on among strangers in anonymous public settings is doubtless different from what happens when like meets like on home turf. Of course, it also must be stressed that there are no scientific studies that document this reputed Boston demeanor. Yet over the years, a weight of colloquial testimony has accumulated that is difficult to deny.

"I feel like a traitor when I talk about this, because I love Boston," says Northeastern's Levin, "but let's be honest about this. There's a culture of rudeness here, and you learn it. You almost have to learn it in order to survive."

Take driving in the city, for a well-cited example. "In every other city, merging traffic into one lane is guided by the rule 'every other car,' " says Levin. "Here it's more 'close your eyes and floor it.' We have our own rules, and they're more aggressive rules, even vengeful rules."

Aside from the area's beginnings as a Colonial beachhead, the weather is another obvious culprit to blame for Boston's mood. McNeill, a Californian who lived in Cambridge for three years while attending Harvard Law School, says: "When I came back here from Boston, it seemed there was a shift in the atmosphere and the climate - of the people as well as weather. People in California simply seem sunnier, and it seems that we smile more and more often."

Of course, while Massachusetts was one of the first frontiers, California is one of the last. People settled here and stayed, "surrounded by their support systems, their family, their friends, their fraternal organizations," says Levin. And while the Boston area grows a new crop of students each season and tends to cyclically attract budding technologies and their workers, it is not perceived to be a land of opportunity on the scale of California or Texas or Florida, which Levin says are flooded each year by people in search of "a new beginning or maybe even a last resort."

In those types of settings, a striver needs to show up smiling. "Everybody's a stranger, so if you're trying to make friends and establish relationships, you can't afford to be rude," says Levin. "But in Boston, people don't need strangers, or at least that's how they feel."

Gray skies are gon-na clear up,
PUT ON A HAP-PY FACE
Brush off the clouds and cheer up,
PUT ON A HAP-PY FACE.
-LEE ADAMS AND CHARLES STROUSE

If the human smile derived from the primate's grimace, it evolved from an expression of fear, a recognition of another's dominance, and it might function subliminally as a sign of submission. Therefore, it might often be used in greetings and other encounters among humans to inspire trust - or at least the lack of intent to do harm. As LaFrance points out, however, "The human species has many other ways to communicate trust, and if everybody is doing the same thing, we trust it." It would follow then, that if Bostonians have tacitly agreed that they don't need to smile while interacting publicly, then nothing may be lost.

But if Ekman and many other researchers are right in believing that the human smile evolved from the chimpanzee's "play face" and is rooted in amusement and joy, then people who don't routinely crinkle their eyes while lifting the corners of their mouths may be missing out big time.

The impulse should start with life. "Infants who don't smile have a hard time getting caretakers to take care of them," says Ekman. "That smile motivates the parent. Smiles attract us to people. The advertisers know that."

There is a certain circuitry in the brain that responds positively to a smile. That perhaps explains centuries' worth of fascination with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, says Givens, the Center for Nonverbal Studies' director. "The world is a much friendlier and nicer place for those who smile, because they elicit good vibes from people they smile at. This includes people who have the luck of the draw genetically to have their lip corners turn up when their face is at rest, like Mona Lisa's. Folks whose lip corners naturally droop when their face is at rest just don't have as much gratuitous friendliness come their way."

Researchers are just now beginning to map out these subliminal pathways in the brain. "People were stuck for years just trying to define emotion," says Harvard's Etcoff. "Almost all of the brain science was on language, cognition, thinking. Emotion was considered too fuzzy or difficult a topic to study." She credits the exquisitely detailed Facial Action Coding System that Ekman and Wallace Friesen devised in the 1970s to measure and compare expressions with "giving us a window into emotion and the beginning of an understanding."

Ekman also revived the work of 19th-century French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, who had determined the physical difference between a true smile of joy and a smile that was simply social. The distinction is in the eyes - particularly in the contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscles, which pull the lower eyelids up and the eyebrows slightly down and often create crow's feet at the outer corners of the eyes. While the mouth smiles at will, Duchenne said that the eyes are inspired "only by the sweet emotions of the soul." And because most people cannot naturally control the muscle that orbits the eye, Duchenne said that it "unmasks the false friend." (Only 10 to 15 percent of people can voluntarily contract the muscle without being taught how, Ekman says.)

Before he confirmed Duchenne's thesis through experiments that compared brain activity to facial expressions, Ekman says that "some of the most distinguished scientists had concluded that smiles meant nothing. They had found that people smile when they're happy and unhappy, so they treated all smiles as the same. Now we are able to distinguish when people are enjoying themselves and when they are not."

Studies have shown that 5-month-old babies shine true smiles - or D-smiles, as they have been dubbed in honor of Duchenne - on their mothers and non D-smiles on strangers. Likewise, couples who are happily married shower each other with D-smiles at the end of a workday, while the unhappily married do not.

Beyond that, Ekman has identified something of a two-way street between pleasure centers in the brain and the facial muscles. Not only does the brain send signals to the face to express emotions, Ekman has found that if we deliberately configure our facial muscles in certain ways, we can send messages in the other direction and voluntarily trigger emotions in our brains. He likens the process somewhat to the Stanislavsky acting technique, which is used to generate emotions on the stage.

Etcoff compares it to ways that we empathize with one another. "If you look at people talking, you'll often see them mimicking each other's facial expressions," she says. "There's an idea that this is how we feel what others feel, that our body, through facial feedback, begins to experience the same emotion." It's an idea that has long existed in our folkloric arts and wisdom but has not been explored extensively in scientific ways.

In our age of angst and pharmacological frenzy, it would seem that the possibilities of such a sublimely simple and cost-free tool of self-induced mood enhancement would be welcomed. Ekman says, however, that he hasn't been able to get funding for clinical trials. He chalks up the lack of funders' interest to the tendency in society to value our species' ability to reason above all else.

"The idea of a rational mind controlling everything is very appealing to some," says Etcoff, "and thinking of emotions as automatic and unconscious has always intrigued people, but I think it has also frightened them."

While Ekman has moved on to other research topics, he says he's working on a book that will teach people how to smile the Duchenne smile and perhaps feel a little happier. Others remain skeptical, however. "I know when he first came out with this, folks were saying, 'Boy, all we have to do is get people to sit in a room and smile, and they'll be happy,' " says Givens. "And it does appear to be a fact that just as your emotional brain can trigger a smile, that there's some reverse triggering. The thing is that the reverse is a weak kind of a shadow that probably doesn't have much practical use."

Perhaps this far from the savannah, people have progressed past their need to smile. Given Boston's success from its early days as a cradle of liberty to current triumphs in technology, education, business, and beyond, it would be hard to argue that the city has suffered from being closed-mouthed. Maybe it's enough that we smirk instead, smug in our achievements and safe in our space. After all, anthropologists aren't agreed on the origins of the smile, much less on its proper, modern usage.

When someone dares to smile at you, what do you do? Grimace or grin?

Copyright 2000 (Boston Globe)