Abstract
Smiles are nonverbal signals that convey social information and influence the social behavior of recipients, but the precise form and social function of a smile can be variable. In previous work, we have proposed that there are at least three physically distinct types of smiles associated with specific social functions: reward smiles signal positive affect and reinforce desired behavior, affiliation smiles signal non-threat and promote peaceful social interactions, dominance smiles signal feelings of superiority and are used to negotiate status hierarchies. The present work advances the science of the smile by addressing a number of questions that directly arise from this smile typology. What do perceivers think when they see each type of smile (study 1)? How do perceivers behave in response to each type of smile (study 2)? Do people produce three physically distinct smiles in response to contexts related to each of the three social functions of smiles (study 3)? We then use an online machine learning platform to uncover the labels that lay people use to conceptualize the smile of affiliation, which is a smile that serves its social function but lacks a corresponding lay concept. Taken together, the present findings support the conclusion that reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles are distinct signals with specific social functions. These findings challenge the traditional assumption that smiles merely convey whether and to what extent a smiler is happy and demonstrate the utility of a social–functional approach to the study of facial expression.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
23 March 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00042-0
Notes
We also note that a lay concept for the dominance smile exists in the concept of a “smirk” which is defined as a smug or condescending smile (Merriam-Webster, 2020).
References
Ambadar, Z., Cohn, J. F., & Reed, L. I. (2009). All smiles are not created equal: Morphology and timing of smiles perceived as amused, polite, and embarrassed/nervous. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33(1), 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-008-0059-5.
Baltrušaitis, T., Zadeh, A., Lim, Y. C., & Morency, L-P. (2018). OpenFace 2.0: Facial behavior analysis toolkit. IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001.
Berg, J., Dickhaut, J., & McCabe, K. (1995). Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games and Economic Behavior, 10(1), 122–142. https://doi.org/10.1006/game.1995.1027.
Centorrino, S., Djemai, E., Hopfensitz, A., Milinski, M., & Seabright, P. (2015). Honest signaling in trust interactions: Smiles rated as genuine induce trust and signal higher earning opportunities. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(1), 8–16.
Cordaro, D. T., Sun, R., Keltner, D., Kamble, S., Huddar, N., & McNeil, G. (2018). Universals and cultural variations in 22 emotional expressions across five cultures. Emotion, 18(1), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000302.
Crivelli, C., Carrera, P., & Fernández-Dols, J.-M. (2015). Are smiles a sign of happiness? Spontaneous expressions of judo winners. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(1), 52–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.009.
Duchenne, G. B. (1876). Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine: où, Analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions.
Ekman, P. (2009). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage (revised ed.). New York, N.Y: WW Norton & Company.
Ekman, P., Davidson, R. J., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology. II. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 342–353 Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2319446.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial action coding system (FACS): A technique for the measurement of facial action. In. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1982). Felt, false, and miserable smiles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 6(4), 238–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00987191.
Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., & O'Sullivan, M. (1988). Smiles when lying. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(3), 414–420 Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3361418.
Fischer, A. H., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2008). Social functions of emotion. Handbook of emotions, 3, 456–468.
Fridlund, A. J. (1991). Evolution and facial action in reflex, social motive, and paralanguage. Biological Psychology, 32(1), 3–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/0301-0511(91)90003-Y.
Friesen, J. P., Kawakami, K., Vingilis-Jaremko, L., Caprara, R., Sidhu, D. M., Williams, A., Hugenberg, K., Rodríguez-Bailón, R., Cañadas, E., & Niedenthal, P. (2019). Perceiving happiness in an intergroup context: The role of race and attention to the eyes in differentiating between true and false smiles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(3), 375–395.
Golub, G. H., & Reinsch, C. (1971). Singular value decomposition and least squares solutions. Linear Algebra, 186, 134–151.
Gunnery, S. D., Hall, J. A., & Ruben, M. A. (2012). The deliberate Duchenne smile: Individual differences in expressive control. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 37(1), 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-012-0139-4.
Gunnery, S. D., & Ruben, M. A. (2016). Perceptions of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles: A meta-analysis. Cognition & Emotion, 30(3), 501–515. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1018817.
Harris, C., & Alvarado, N. (2005). Facial expressions, smile types, and self-report during humour, tickle, and pain. Cognition & Emotion, 19(5), 655–669. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000472.
Hoque, M., Morency, L.-P., & Picard, R. W. (2011). Are you friendly or just polite?–Analysis of smiles in spontaneous face-to-face interactions. 6974, 135-144. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24600-5_17.
Jamieson, K. G., Jain, L., Fernandez, C., Glattard, N., & Nowak, R. (2015). NEXT: A system for real-world development, evaluation, and application of active learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 28.
Jensen, M. (2015). Smile as feedback expressions in interpersonal interaction. International Journal of Psychological Studies, 7(4), 95. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijps.v7n4p95.
Johnston, L., Miles, L., & Macrae, C. N. (2010). Why are you smiling at me? Social functions of enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49(Pt 1), 107–127. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466609X412476.
Keltner, D. (1995). Signs of appeasement: Evidence for the distinct displays of embarrassment, amusement, and shame. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(3), 441–454. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.441.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (1999). Social functions of emotions at four levels of analysis. Cognition & Emotion, 13(5), 505–521. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999399379168.
Kenrick, D. T., Maner, J. K., Butner, J., Li, N. P., Becker, D. V., & Schaller, M. (2016). Dynamical evolutionary psychology: Mapping the domains of the new interactionist paradigm. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6(4), 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0604_09.
Kosinski, M., Wang, Y., Lakkaraju, H., & Leskovec, J. (2016). Mining big data to extract patterns and predict real-life outcomes. Psychological methods, 21(4), 493.
Kraus, M. W., & Chen, T. W. (2013). A winning smile? Smile intensity, physical dominance, and fighter performance. Emotion, 13(2), 270–279. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030745.
Kraut, R. E., & Johnston, R. E. (1979). Social and emotional messages of smiling: An ethological approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(9), 1539–1553. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.9.1539.
Krumhuber, E. G., & Manstead, A. S. (2009). Can Duchenne smiles be feigned? New evidence on felt and false smiles. Emotion, 9(6), 807–820. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017844.
Kunz, M., Prkachin, K., & Lautenbacher, S. (2009). The smile of pain. Pain, 145(3), 273–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2009.04.009.
LaFrance, M. (2011). Why smile?: The science behind facial expressions. WW Norton & Company.
Maringer, M., Krumhuber, E. G., Fischer, A. H., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2011). Beyond smile dynamics: Mimicry and beliefs in judgments of smiles. Emotion, 11(1), 181–187. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022596.
Martin, J. D., Abercrombie, H. C., Gilboa-Schechtman, E., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2018). Functionally distinct smiles elicit different physiological responses in an evaluative context. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 3558. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21536-1.
Martin, J. D., Wood, A., Rychlowska, M., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2017). Smiles as multipurpose social signals. Trends in Cognitive Sciences., 21, 864–877. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.08.007.
Mehu, M., Grammer, K., & Dunbar, R. I. (2007). Smiles when sharing. Evolution and Human behavior, 28(6), 415–422.
Merriam-Webster. (2020). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/smirk.
Nettle, D. (2006). Happiness: The science behind your smile. USA: Oxford University Press.
Niedenthal, P. M., Mermillod, M., Maringer, M., & Hess, U. (2010). The simulation of smiles (SIMS) model: Embodied simulation and the meaning of facial expression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(6), 417–433; discussion 433-480. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000865.
Reed, L. I., Zeglen, K. N., & Schmidt, K. L. (2012). Facial expressions as honest signals of cooperative intent in a one-shot anonymous Prisoner's Dilemma game. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(3), 200–209.
Rychlowska, M., Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G. B., Schyns, P. G., Martin, J. D., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2017). Functional smiles: Tools for love, sympathy, and war. Psychological Science, 28(9), 1259–1270. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617706082.
Rychlowska, M., van der Schalk, J., Niedenthal, P. M., Martin, J. D., Carpenter, S. M., & Manstead, A. R. (under review). Reward, affiliative, and dominance smiles communicate different social motives following trust violations. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/58gpb.
Scharlemann, J. P. W., Eckel, C. C., Kacelnik, A., & Wilson, R. K. (2001). The value of a smile: Game theory with a human face. Journal of Economic Psychology, 22(5), 617–640. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-4870(01)00059-9.
Sievert, S., Ross, D., Jain, L., Jamieson, K., Nowak, R., & Mankoff, R. (2017). NEXT: A system to easily connect crowd sourcing and adaptive data collection. Proceedings of the 16th Python in Science Conference (SCIPY).
Stewart, P. A., Bucy, E. P., & Mehu, M. (2015). Strengthening bonds and connecting with followers. Politics and the Life Sciences, 34(1), 73–92. https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2015.5.
Tanczos, E., Nowak, R., & Mankoff, B. (2017). A kl-lucb algorithm for large-scale crowdsourcing. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.
Team, R. C. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing.
Thibault, P., Levesque, M., Gosselin, P., & Hess, U. (2012). The Duchenne marker is not a universal signal of smile authenticity–but it can be learned! Social Psychology, 43(4), 215–221. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000122.
van Dijk, E., van Kleef, G. A., Steinel, W., & van Beest, I. (2008). A social functional approach to emotions in bargaining: When communicating anger pays and when it backfires. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(4), 600–614. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.4.600.
Westfall, J., Kenny, D. A., & Judd, C. M. (2014). Statistical power and optimal design in experiments in which samples of participants respond to samples of stimuli. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 2020–2045. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000014.
Witkower, Z., & Tracy, J. (2019). A facial-action imposter: How head tilt influences perceptions of dominance from a neutral face. Psychological Science, 30(6), 893–906. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619838762.
Wood, A. (under review). Social context influences the acoustic properties of laughter. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/npk8u.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
JDM and PMN developed the concept of the study. All authors contributed to the study design. Data collection and analysis was performed by JDM. JDM drafted the manuscript, and all authors provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final manuscript for submission.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Funding
This work was supported by the NIH (grant number T32MH018931-26 to JDM), the US–Israeli BSF (grant number 2013205 to PMN), and the NSF (grant number 1355397 to PMN). Further support for this research was provided by the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Disclaimer
Sources of financial support had no influence over the design, analysis, interpretation, or choice of submission outlet for this research.
Data Availability
Data are publicly available at https://osf.io/qs35g/.
Ethical Approval
All studies reported in this manuscript underwent ethical review and were approved by the UW-Madison IRB.
Informed Consent
All participants provided informed consent prior to participation.
Additional information
Handling editor: Jonathan Gratch
Supplementary Information
ESM 1
(DOCX 39 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Martin, J.D., Wood, A., Cox, W.T.L. et al. Evidence for Distinct Facial Signals of Reward, Affiliation, and Dominance from Both Perception and Production Tasks. Affec Sci 2, 14–30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00024-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00024-8