Smiling and the Effect on Others

Smiling is a simple and common gesture made by people countless times in a day. Has smiling lost its effect on others through routine? I think that smiling will never lose its way of impacting others and us throughout our lives daily. Maybe smiles really are the gateway to ones true personality; maybe smiles really are just muscles tensing in one’s face; or maybe smiles are useless. Smiles affect our lives from the day we are born until the day that we die. I think we all might as well know a little more about how they work in order to utilize this special skill more effectively.

In the article, The Psychological Study of Smiling written by Eric Jaffe, we go through the science and benefits of smiling. Jaffe explains the muscle movements and autonomic acts of smiling. The most interesting part in my opinion is the way humans can decipher a “real” smile from a “fake” smile. The way one can tell a real smile from a fake smile is through the eyes (Jeffe, 2010). He then goes on to explain the variation of smiles. Smiles differ from different events such as “listening to jazz music, reading the Bible, looking at pornography, and decapitating live rats” (Jeffe 2010). Researchers have now decided that smiles do not show ones expression, but their true personality (Jeffe, 2010). This is the part of the article that really sparked my interest. My mother has always told me to put a smile on my face when I am feeling shy or sad or scared in order to mask my true emotions from the world. I always thought this to be true until finding out that this could be foiled by looking at my eyes. Is there a way for me to teach myself to mask my smile even more? Or even a way to learn to feel genuinely happy at all costs? Another im...

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