It is widely believed that smiling means a person is happy, and it usually occurs when they're meeting another person or a group of people. However, a new study led by the body language expert Dr. Harry Witchel shows this isn't always the case.
In his research, he asked 44 participants aged 18-35 to play a geography quiz game consisting of nine difficult questions so that they often got the answer wrong. Participants seated interacted with a computer alone in a room while their faces were video recorded.
After the quiz, the participants were asked to rate their experience using a range of 12 emotions including "bored", "interested" and "frustrated". Meanwhile, their facial expressions were then computer analysed frame by frame in order to judge how much they were smiling based on a scale of between 0 to 1.
Dr Witchel said: "According to some researchers, a real smile reflects the inner state of cheerfulness or amusement. However, behavioral ecology theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions, meaning cheerfulness is neither necessary nor rich for smiling. Our study showed that in these human-computer interaction experiments, smiling isn't driven by happiness; it is associated with subjective involvement(主观参与),which acts like a social fuel for smiling, even when socializing with a computer on your own."
Surprisingly, participants didn't tend to smile during the period when they were trying to figure out the answers. However, they did smile right after the computer game informed them if their answer was correct or wrong. Participants smiled more often when they got the answer wrong. Dr. Witchel added: "During these computerized quizzes, smiling was greatly increased just after answering questions incorrectly. This behavior could be explained by self-ratings of engagement, rather than by ratings of happiness or frustration."
