Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312160259
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN SCHWARTZ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We see the world and react, our faces a rear-projection screen for our emotions. But can feelings work in the other direction? Can the expressions on our faces spark feelings, instead of the other way around?
Recent psychological research suggests that they can: Voluntarily making a certain kind of smile triggers some of the same physiological responses in the brain that have been associated with positive feelings. Perhaps, as the old song says, there are smiles that make you happy.
But not every smile. Many expressions are lumped together under the name, but they differ in minute yet significant ways. Some of those distinctions were described by the 19th-century French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, who detailed the role of each of the more than 100 muscles in the face.
The most sincere, deeply felt smile, according to Duchenne, results from the simultaneous contraction of two muscle groups: the zygomatic major muscles, which tug the sides of the mouth; and the orbicularis oculi muscles, which circle the eye. (The fake smile of ``cheeeeese'' fame exercises the zygomatic alone.) When the eye muscles kick in, they produce crow's feet and a slight droop in the skin directly above the eyes - the mark of pleasure.
As Duchenne put it, ``The first obeys the will, but the second is only put in play by the sweet emotions of the soul.''
A small group of modern researchers is building on Duchenne's work. One, psychologist Paul Ekman of the Human Interaction Lab at the University of California at San Francisco, developed a system for reading the emotions behind facial expressions with colleague Wallace V. Friesen in the 1970s. Ekman has dubbed the sincerely happy smile ``Duchenne's smile.''
Ekman and colleagues have since shown that Duchenne's smile shows up often when people watch pleasant films of puppies gamboling in flowers and the like. They also showed subjects unpleasant sights, such as ``quite gruesome'' films for nurse training that depict burn victims and amputations.
Those viewing the gruesome films sometimes smiled, but they were the expressions of people trying to appear as if they were feeling all right, Ekman said. Few of those smiles showed the Duchenne characteristics.
The electroencephalographs (EEGs) of such subjects confirmed a link between Duchenne's smile and positive emotions. The happy smilers showed increased activity in the front of the brain - specifically, in the left anterior temporal region of the cortex. That physiological change has been seen, for example, in babies who are approached by their mothers.
Ekman and psychologist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison then decided to test whether people who were asked to make facial expressions voluntarily that imitated Duchenne's marker could trigger the same physiological reactions that spontaneous good feelings did.
They found 14 University of Wisconsin undergraduates who could learn to contract the orbicularis oculi muscles - a fairly rare skill - at the same time they were flexing the zygomatic.
The students' EEGs bore out the researchers' hypothesis: The patterns of brain activity for spontaneous Duchenne smiles and the deliberate Duchenne imitations were clearly similar. The results of the experiment were published recently in the journal Psychological Science.
The researchers concluded: ``Our results suggest it may be possible for an individual to choose when to generate some of the physiological changes that occur during a spontaneous emotion - by simply making a facial expression.''
Does Ekman's work with grins indicate that ``smile therapy'' could be on the way? Perhaps not.
Because the students who were tested started from an emotionally neutral state, Ekman said, it is impossible at this point to say if smiling could lift someone out of the dumps. ``All you can really say is if you're feeling sort of blah or neutral, you can start another emotion going,'' Ekman said. ``If you've got an emotion you're trying to get rid of, we can't really tell you if that will work.''
Davidson stressed that the physiological changes he and Ekman recorded don't necessarily add up to happiness. Although the EEGs of real smiles and voluntary smiles bear similarities, they do not include the entire range of responses that occur when someone is experiencing happy thoughts.
In fact, Davidson said that ``the subjects in our study did not report themselves to be significantly more happy'' when producing Duchenne smiles.
This winter Ekman and Davidson hope to test their findings on other emotional states. Following the lead of the U.S. Marine Corps, which orders its recruits to grimace and roar during boot camp training, the researchers will try turning on the physiology of aggression through facial expression. They will also explore fear, disgust and sadness, Ekman said.
by CNB