Why some grins cheer you up and others make you say “nope nope nope nope nope.”
can be construed as sarcastic. Smiling, historically, wasn’t always something that humans did to emote happiness—and in fact, both Barrett and Mason agree, smiling is pretty American. “I have one friend who is a cultural psychologist who moved here from the Netherlands and she told me that her cheeks ached for a year after she moved here,” Barrett noted.
So who do we have to blame for this stereotype? Who let us believe that smiles equated to happiness, leaving us vulnerable to the effects of this film?None other than our boy Charles Darwin. It was upon discovering the work of French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who used electro-therapy to induce motor movements and gave the “Duchenne smile” its name, that Darwin developed his theory of facial expressions. “Darwin believed that facial expressions of emotion were vestigial, like your tailbone,” explained Barrett. “If you could find something that was functional in other animals but was vestigial in humans, that would be evidence for his view that humans were the product of natural selection.” Darwin believed that the way we express emotion are leftovers of behavioral evolutions that occurred in our animal predecessors, leftovers that lasted because they gave us a competitive edge. without any other context, holding out my fingers to block everything but the face itself, I can register it as a normal smile. Theare a little more eerie, but there are other reasons for that: the actors’ body language, their stiff posture, the immobility of their smiles, etc. Realizing that I can’t tell just from their facial expression alone whether someone may want to kill me is not exactly