THE SECRET OF SMILING

IN 1967, a young man from San Francisco named Paul Ekman went in search of a tribe that lived so far from “known civilization” that it might have been on another planet. Could there still be people on earth who had never been in contact with outsiders, who had no knowledge of writing or print, to say nothing of television? Ekman knew only that he didn’t have much time, that within a few years the most remote jungle villages might be within reach of radio signals, roads, and airplanes.

At the time, Papua New Guinea was regarded as the end of the world, an island that one associated with headhunters and cannibals. But the thirty-three-year-old Ekman was fearless, and, all alone, he set out for the Stone Age. He wasn’t really interested in exotic customs or in documenting still more examples of cultural strangeness for anthropological scholarship. Rather, he wanted to explore an area common to all humans: the secret of smiling.1

People’s expectations for this endeavor were low. Colleagues warned that there was little to discover in the play of facial expression. A mother smiles at her baby, and the baby smiles back. That’s that. When Ekman was setting out thirty years ago, no one dared question the assumption that humans come into the world as a blank page. A child was seen as an empty vessel to be filled with the knowledge and customs of its parents and environment. We learn our facial expressions in childhood, just as we learn everything else. Only Ekman thought otherwise. Wouldn’t it be possible, he asked himself, for feelings to be present at birth? Do we perhaps have some kind of preinstalled switch for smiling? If this were true, everyone in the world would exhibit the same facial expressions at comparable moments. Hadn’t Charles Darwin already suspected as much?

STONE AGE FACES

With his backpack filled with cameras, tape recorders, and photographs of faces, the young researcher hiked toward the New Guinea highlands, with a local guide leading the way. After a few weeks, they entered a region that no one of European descent had ever seen. It was inhabited by the South Fore, a tribe whose custom of eating the brains of deceased relatives had been prohibited only eight years earlier. They lived in huts constructed from woven grass and leaves and used tools carved from stone. The women wore grass skirts, while the men were clothed in tangas made from beef hide. They gave the scientist and his guide a friendly welcome.

Ekman sat down in the center of the small village and unpacked his tape recorders. Never had the people here seen a shiny box like this on which two circles turned, seemingly on their own. And suddenly they heard their own voices! Their mouths began to open, their cheekbones lifted, their eyes sparkled: they were smiling. Clearly they were excited by the surprise. In the background, Ekman’s guide was filming the event—the first proof that people from the other end of the world smile just as we do.

From then on, the South Fore didn’t leave Ekman’s side for even a moment. They were surrounding him in eager anticipation of the day’s entertainment before he woke up in the morning. Some days he chased after the children with a rubber knife so that his guide could photograph the frightened faces. On other days he showed portraits of Americans both cheerful and sad and through his guide asked the South Fore to identify the parent of a dying child. They pointed unanimously to the sad face—apparently they could understand the expressions on the faces of the foreign Americans with no difficulty. After a few weeks, Ekman asked his guide to arrange encounters in which one villager would meet another, as if spontaneously. The cameras recorded the happy smiles of greeting.

After four months in the jungle, Ekman returned to the United States and studied his photos. He no longer had any doubt: the faces of the South Fore showed exactly the same expressions as those of people in the Western world. Languages may differ from one nation to another, but faces, whether those of the South Fore of the New Guinea highlands or those of San Franciscans, express feelings in exactly the same way.

Scientists were excited and intrigued by this discovery. Some of them set out to disprove Ekman’s theory. They went to the jungles of Borneo, to nomads in Iran, and to the most remote regions of the Soviet Union, only to return home empty-handed. It was the same story everywhere: culture has hardly any impact on the repertoire of human emotions. Some peoples may show feelings more openly, others less so, but joy and sadness, fear and anger, are feelings shared by everyone.

With this one discovery Ekman refuted two errors. First, from now on it would be difficult to claim that children learn emotions from the people around them. If that were the case, there would have to be different kinds of smiles around the world, much as “joy” is “Freude” in Germany and “gaoxing” in China. But once it is established that facial expressions are the same everywhere, we know that basic emotions and the way in which our bodies express them are inborn.

Congenitally blind children, who are not able to copy facial expressions, smile spontaneously. This fact alone should have raised doubts in the minds of those who believed that joy was learned; even Charles Darwin had initiated a study in a home for the blind for his book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872). But this work by the great evolutionary biologist was as good as forgotten, and belief in the learned acquisition of feelings was so unshakable that no scientist thought of following Darwin’s suggestion and talking to a few teachers of the blind. Thus, Paul Ekman had to go to the South Seas. Science, too, can be prejudiced.2

There’s another matter in which Ekman was even more influential. Filming the facial expressions of the South Fore, he showed that feelings can be the subject of scientific study. That was no small feat, for anyone concerned with emotions at the end of the 1960s was very much on the margins of academic psychology. The subjects deemed worthy of serious research were perception, thinking, and behavior. The examination of feelings unfolding inside people, seemingly hidden from sight, was left to philosophers and poets. But Ekman removed any doubts about the accessibility of private experience to science.

This young man from the distant highlands of Papua New Guinea has never before seen someone from another tribe or nation, but the joy radiating from his face is familiar to us. Elementary feelings and the way we express them are inborn, which is why the language of smiling is understood worldwide. This photo comes from the psychologist Paul Ekman’s research expedition.

GENUINE SMILES AND USEFUL SMILES

Encouraged by his success, the young researcher invented an entire system for translating expression of feeling into numbers and tables, as if dividing it into its constituent atoms. It takes forty-two muscles in the human face to create facial expressions. Ekman gave a number to each. “Nine,” for example, meant wrinkling the nose, “fifteen,” pressing the lips together. Now the researchers could record even the wildest grimaces on the computer.

With this tool, Ekman discovered nineteen different ways of smiling. Of these, eighteen are not genuine, though they are very useful, serving as masks when we don’t wish to show others the entire truth about our feelings. There is a smile with which we show politeness after being embarrassed by a bad joke; a smile that conceals our fear; another that hides displeasure. Although all smiling engages the zygomatic muscle that stretches from the cheekbone to the upper lip and pulls up the corners of the mouth, the other muscle groups in the face orchestrate various false smiles. These make human interaction possible, but they have little to do with joy.

Only one kind of smile is genuine: not only do the corners of the mouth go up, but the eyes are slightly narrowed, small wrinkles appear in their corners (“crow’s feet”), and the upper half of the cheeks rise. Only when the orbicularis oculi muscle contracts does the face show happiness. Ekman called this facial movement the Duchenne smile, in honor of the French physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, who in 1862 was the first to study the orbicularis oculi, the sphincter muscle that surrounds the entire eye,

With the help of his facial numbering system, Ekman could show that only the Duchenne smile expresses a true sense of contentment. When he showed subjects cheerful films, this smile—and almost never any other—frequently flitted across their faces. The more frequently the corners of their eyes crinkled into crow’s feet, the more emphatic they were afterward about the pleasure the film gave them. But when they saw frightening scenes of fire victims or amputations, the Duchenne smile disappeared. The movement of the orbicularis oculi muscle, then, is an infallible sign of joy.3

Duchenne called these contractions the “sweet emotions of the soul.” He already knew that we can control this muscle by force of will only with great difficulty, which is why most of us fail miserably when asked to “smile for the camera.” So Duchenne used another method to help his experimental subjects smile: With thin wires he conducted an electric charge across their cheeks,4 thereby stimulating the orbicularis oculi muscle so powerfully that his subjects showed a smile that was unnaturally cheerful. The photos of these experiments now hang in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Only about ten percent of all people are able to control their facial muscles so well that without special training they can produce a Duchenne smile on command. This ability is probably congenital. Most of the rest of us have to learn to fake a real smile. A funny joke helps, or remembering a situation in which we felt especially good.

Even actors, and especially politicians, struggle with this problem. A cheaply produced soap opera shows how difficult it is to bring facial movements and feelings under control. Not for a second do we believe the actors’ unskilled expressions of feeling. Among the more talented thespians, however, there are many who have been trained to control their facial muscles. Laurence Olivier, for example, was famous for knowing how each feeling had to look from the point of view of the spectator. But even some Hollywood stars never learn to control the features of their face, and it’s for good reason that Steve McQueen and John Wayne made the unmovable poker face their trademark.

Using fine electric wires that he placed on the face of an experimental subject in 1862, the physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne was able to stimulate an artificial smile. Weak currents stimulated the facial muscles of this old man in such a way that his expression shows a genuine smile: the corners are the mouth are turned upward, and the orbicularis oculi muscle contracts.

HAPPINESS ARISES FROM THE BODY

Has someone paid you a compliment, or sent you flowers, or have you enjoyed a particularly good meal? It is not only the face that shows positive feelings. Your body responds with excitement to whatever is giving you pleasure. This is worth paying attention to, because it becomes possible to be aware of many of the resulting changes.

When you are happy, the blood pulses somewhat faster in your veins. In most people, three to five heartbeats a minute distinguish happiness from their normal state. Because blood circulation improves, skin temperature rises by about a tenth of a degree centigrade. This stimulation causes skin to become somewhat damper, and skin conductance drops. Even your fingers tremble, though not in a jerky way. You’d notice this difference—which amounts to a tenth of a millimeter—only if you were trying to thread a needle. But perhaps you would be able to perceive the source of this trembling: the micromovements of the fingers that the scientists have measured is mirrored in the tension of the musculature of the shoulders, arms, and hands. When you feel good, these muscles relax and become more flexible.5 In addition, since happiness also shifts our hormonal balance, changes take place that we don’t feel directly—but more about this later.

Before you or the people around you become aware of the beginning of a smile, things have already happened in the face. The zygomatic muscle, which pulls the mouth upward, has tensed a bit. The orbicularis oculi muscle with its crow’s feet has also contracted slightly. On the other hand, the corrugator supercilii muscle, which creates expressions of disgust, sadness, and fear by pulling up the eyebrows, is relaxed.

This is what happiness looks like. As with all feelings, it begins as much in the body as in the brain, because a sense of well-being happens only when the brain receives and interprets the necessary signs from the heart, the skin, and the muscles. Without our bodies, we would be incapable of happiness.

Initially, this might seem like a strange idea. Clearly, we owe some feelings of happiness—for example, when we eat or make love—to a sense of physical pleasure that is almost unalloyed. But what happens when we remember a good time with friends, or look forward to a vacation? In such moments of happiness our imagination seems to play the decisive role. But this is an illusion. Thoughts, memories, and hopes alone do not enable us to experience emotion. Only when they link with the right body signals can we experience joy, because it is from them that the brain constructs the perception of well-being. Try being happy with tense muscles and a cold sweat!

Thus, happiness arises at least as much from our bodies—arms and legs, heart and skin—as from our imagination and thinking. For this reason, we would be well advised to take our bodies much more seriously than we are accustomed to doing.

THE AUTONOMY OF POSITIVE FEELINGS

Positive feelings are linked to the body. This is why it is so difficult to feel or show happiness on command—an annoying fact that has to do with the architecture of the brain. There are nerves that are responsible for controlling the body and thus also for directing emotions over which our consciousness has no power. In order to understand this, we have to look more closely at how the human organism processes data.

Anatomy books usually show the nervous system of the body as a tree standing on its head and more or less rooted in the brain. Signaling pathways branch out ever more finely from the brain stem to the organs and limbs.

This may suggest the image of a unified structure that weaves all these pathways together, but that’s not the way it is. In fact, the human nervous system is divided into two parts that work largely independently of one another: the voluntary and the autonomic nervous system. The voluntary (or somatic) nervous system directs most of the muscles that move our bones. The instruction to bend my index finger in order to continue typing this text follows these nerves. These commands issue from the cerebral cortex, that furrowed, gray dome directly under the top of the skull, where our wishes, imagination, and thoughts arise. The voluntary nervous system is in direct contact with this part of the brain.

The autonomic nervous system, on the other hand, originates on the other side of the brain. It begins in the brain stem, in the very first gray cells at neck level. Here reside the circuits that govern the basic functions of the organism. They direct waking and sleeping, control the heartbeat, and stimulate our genitals. The nerves of the involuntary nervous system barely lead to the skeletal muscles at all, but rather to the internal organs, the blood vessels, and all the way down to the tiny skin muscles that hold up each hair. This part of the nervous system causes us to blush when we’re embarrassed, our hair to stand on end when we’re afraid, and our pulse to race when we’re in love.

Since, as its name suggests, we have no control over the autonomic nervous system, we can’t simply decide to be happy. This part of the nervous system not only governs the orbicularis oculi muscle required for the genuine smile, it controls our heartbeat, circulation, and perspiration—all those unconscious movements of the body that the brain perceives in order to create positive feelings. This is why we can’t change our emotions directly. We have to proceed more cleverly.

OUR BODIES KNOW MORE THAN WE DO

There’s another reason why it wouldn’t make sense for us to try to influence the autonomic nervous system. Because it governs those bodily functions that are essential to life, an incorrect decision could have fatal consequences. So the brain is programmed to prevent us from holding our breath for very long, or from making our heart stop.

The autonomic nervous system accomplishes most of its tasks in association with chemical transmitters called hormones. This gives the brain two ways of overseeing the organism: it sends electrical signals through the nervous system and chemical signals via the hormones. The brain itself can create hormones in the pituitary gland and secrete them into the bloodstream—something very practical, since this enables brain circuits to make direct contact with the organs rather than having to take a detour through the nerves. Transmitters help the brain to watch constantly over the level of substances in the body that are critical for survival and to intervene when necessary. In this way, the autonomic nervous system and hormones together keep the organism in optimal running order.

This automatic survival program has one other advantage: it prevents us from wasting too much attention on simple bodily functions. It leaves our head free for matters that we would seldom get to if we had to occupy ourselves with the question of whether our liver, for example, is producing enough enzymes to break down last night’s alcohol.

We are aware of this system only when it becomes seriously imbalanced. Then our bodily reactions force us to act. If our blood sugar level gets too low, hunger torments us. If the alcohol doesn’t disappear quickly enough from our blood after we’ve had a night on the town, our head pounds—a warning for the next time.

The control of our organism works like the user interface of a computer. Both place a protective shell around the complicated processes internal to the system, preventing us from getting near them. The only technical information that the user ever sees is the occasional error message, when the program can no longer help itself. Many unpleasant feelings correspond precisely to that message.

For this reason, the emotions themselves—and not only the processes that direct the body—are shielded from the will’s direct influence. We can only control them indirectly by treating ourselves well—by changing our environment or our thoughts, or by remembering pleasant situations. But if a huge bear suddenly comes toward us in the woods, we can’t choose whether we want to be afraid. We’re afraid before we can reflect. The heart begins to race, our breath becomes shallower—the body is preparing to run. In the seconds that it would take for a person to make a conscious decision, an aggressive animal could tear his victim apart. So the body answers the threat before we begin to feel the fear.

So, too, we feel pleasure as soon as we notice something that could be useful to us. These are the small moments of happiness: if we’re hungry and the bakery’s smells waft our way, our mouth waters. If a friend walks toward us, a smile of welcome crosses our face, and in the same moment we experience joy. We experience feelings when we perceive the involuntary reactions of our bodies.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER INTUITION

Do the reactions of the body move ahead of the feelings, like the waves in front of a ship’s bow? A landmark experiment directed toward this question comes from the lab of the Portuguese-American neurologist Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa, one of the most important centers in the field of emotion research. Among the resources Damasio and his wife, Hanna, have assembled is the largest archive of images of damaged brains in the world. Thanks to CAT-scan technology that creates spatial images of living brains, the Damasios have examined more than 2,500 heads. They bring these inner views of ailing brains together with the case studies of their patients, who suffer from every imaginable disorder of thought, feeling, and behavior, giving the Danasios insight into the workings of the human mind. Because their archive is so unique, experiments from the Damasios’ lab will be cited often in this book.

Using relatively simple means, the Iowa scientists have shown how the first manifestations of joy, aversion, fear, and anger are, indeed, somatic. They presented experimental subjects with a game of chance and hooked them up to a lie detector.6 This game—it has come to be known as the Iowa Card Test—consists of repeatedly pulling cards from two closed decks. The good pile yielded moderate wins and smaller losses, the bad pile a fairly large win, but more often huge losses.

After about the tenth draw, the subjects began to avoid the bad pile, and the lie detector showed the beginnings of a cold sweat and a pounding heart as soon as their hands approached the risky cards.7 The subjects, however, didn’t know why they were behaving in this way, nor were they aware of their physical reactions. Only after about fifty draws did they report a conscious aversion to the bad pile. And it took even longer—until about the eightieth draw—before they could explain this response and the principle of the game.

Intuition—this strange sense that we sometimes get when first meeting a person who later turns out to be hostile—does exist, though we can’t explain premonitions of this kind, because they derive from unconscious emotions. For example, when we first meet someone who turns out to be an enemy, a threatening facial expression may quickly pass over his face, sparking an imperceptible moment of fear.

Intuition works for us even when we can’t tell what is going on. A few less intelligent people never did manage to grasp the system behind the card test, but they chose correctly nonetheless. On this point, popular belief has proved to be more savvy than science, which for centuries has denied the possibility of any knowledge other than that available through reason.

But—contrary to what is often thought—emotional insight is not based on supersensible phenomena. Rather, intuition is anchored solidly in our bodies. We attain it by experience. When first pulling the cards, the participants in the experiment did not yet have a feeling for the better pile. First the brain had to learn to predict the result. A premonition happens when this calculation—one pile is good, the other is bad—is transmitted to the body before it reaches consciousness.

In the example of the aggressive bear (described by the American psychologist William James), we’ve already seen the usefulness of intuitive behavior that bypasses conscious thought. It makes life easier for the individual and saves valuable time in the face of danger. Sometimes, then, the body knows better than reason, or, in the words of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”8

IMAGES FROM OUR INNER WORLD

Like our anxious subjects with the bad pile of cards, we are often not aware of the depth of our emotions in daily life. We might know that we’re blushing only when someone points it out to us. And our eyes may be sparkling with enthusiasm when we ourselves don’t know how happy we are.

In such moments it becomes clear that emotions and feelings are not one and the same, although in conversation we usually employ the words interchangeably. But there is a difference: an emotion is an automatic response of the body to a specific situation—the flash of our eyes in pleasure, or the reddening of the face when we’re caught in a white lie. We experience a feeling when we perceive these emotions consciously—as pleasure or as shame.9

Emotions, then, are unconscious; feelings are conscious. We perceive most emotions also as feelings, which is why the layman makes no distinction between them. Nonetheless, some emotions can remain hidden from us, as, for example, when we blush and no one brings it to our attention.

How does an emotion produce a feeling? With their equipment, the scientists working with Antonio Donasio were able to observe the brain in decisive moments. They asked healthy subjects to think back to very happy or very sad moments in their lives: reuniting with a loved person, or the death of a parent. For a few test runs, the researchers checked the reactions of the subjects with a lie detector and selected those who showed especially strong reactions. Then they slid them into a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner, a machine that takes up an entire room. The subject lies enclosed in a narrow metal tube, strapped in so that the images don’t blur—not exactly an atmosphere likely to stimulate thoughts of Fantasy Island. A solution with weakly radioactive modified glucose (serving as a contrast medium) flows through a drip into the blood. Even so, the subjects were transported so deeply into their memories that they forgot all the technology surrounding them. Some even began to cry. Meanwhile, Damasio and his colleagues watched the screen and observed the parts of the brain that the patient’s strong feelings were activating.10

The images that the scientists presented in 2000 drew attention for two reasons. First, they showed in detail never seen before what happens inside the brain when we feel happiness and sadness, annoyance and anger. With the PET scanner, one can actually see what feeling is going on within a person at any given moment. Second, these images give stronger evidence than anything available to date that feelings actually do follow the reactions of the body. Precisely those areas are illuminated on the monitor that are necessary to create an image of the body in the brain: underneath, the brain stem, which controls the entire organism; in the middle, parts of the cerebellum and the interbrain that process these data; and at the top, finally, the cerebrum, which brings all this information together into a coherent image and connects it to our conscious perceptions, thoughts, and fantasies.11 We become conscious of an emotion only when it has been processed by the cerebrum.

FEELINGS IN THE BRAIN

Right: The brain is constructed like a building with several stories. The foundation is the brain stem, which receives signals from the body. It grows out of the spinal cord and into the midbrain. Above the midbrain is the diencephalon, which is responsible for arousal. It controls the organism in that it releases hormones through the pituitary gland. At the very top, underneath the top of the skull, arches the dome of the cerebrum, which supervises all the rest of the brain. Its functions are sensual perceptions, thinking, planning, and all the activities of consciousness.

Left: The tomographic image shows how happiness and sadness are created in the brain. For every feeling has its corresponding pattern of brain activity. Nonetheless, some parts of the brain are active in both feelings: the data goes from the body through the brain stem. The midbrain is especially active here, as can be seen from the darker coloration. The cerebellum, which hangs like a backpack on the brain stem, processes the impulses from the brain stem and gives orders to the muscles—for example, if something pleases us, the command to laugh. Above it lies the diencephalon, which is activated to release emotional excitement. In the cerebrum the gyri (folds of the brain) behind the eyes, the so-called prefrontal cortex, are especially active. It converts the emotions to plans and actions. (Damasio, 2000)

Every feeling—and thus also happiness—depends on the brain receiving and then processing signals from the body. Even in moments of supreme bliss, when it’s as if we’re in another world, it’s in perceiving our own body that our feelings of euphoria arise. As Damasio reminds us, our mind is, in the true sense of the word, embodied, not “embrained.” A disembodied being would feel neither happiness nor sadness. And, should you tire of physical stimuli, your body, according to Damasio, can be stimulated by the brain, even unconsciously. Much as a fantasy image can be seen by the inner eye, so the brain stem can feign impulses that it doesn’t really receive. Damasio believes that this enables the organism to save itself the trouble of speeding up its pulse and going through the entire program of positive emotions in less important situations—when, for example, it experiences a minor pleasure—allowing, nonetheless, a feeling of pleasant arousal, in energy-saving mode, as it were. In all likelihood this mechanism helps people left paraplegic by an accident keep their capacity for emotion alive.12

DOES SMILING MAKE YOU HAPPY?

It has become conventional wisdom that a sourpuss has only to smile in order to lift his spirits. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, even advised his young people to force a smile when they were afraid or experienced something unpleasant—the world, he claimed, would then seem friendlier.13

Can we really make ourselves happy with the aid of our facial muscles? Paul Ekman pursued this question scientifically, and corroborated the insight that smiling will indeed make you happy. If feelings originate in the body, then it is logical to conclude that the body can also alter feelings. Alas, this path to happiness turns out not to be as smooth as we’d like to think, for by no means does every smile attain its end. The polite expression that we strive for when we ask our boss for a raise might mask our insecurity, but it won’t make us euphoric, because we’ve only feigned the good mood. We feel really good only when we make a genuine Duchenne smile, raising the corners of our mouth while also crinkling the corners of the eyes into crow’s feet.

Since most people aren’t able to control these movements, Ekman taught the participants in his experiments to train their orbicularis oculi muscle, but without telling them why. Then he was able to show that the signals of happiness didn’t go in only one direction. The better the participants in the experiment learned to control their orbicularis oculi muscle, the more frequently they reported a good mood that they themselves were not able to explain. But this wasn’t enough for Ekman. He also recorded the brain waves of his students when they consciously forced their face into a “genuine” smile.14 And indeed, the resulting electric signals really were indistinguishable from those sent in the course of an amused response to a well-told joke. Smiling makes us happy, but only the right kind of smile. Tricking the brain takes skill.