While the combinations of emotions and facial muscles can create infinite expressions and smiles, there are 12 types of smiles you’ll see most often. Here’s what they each mean. “Smiles of true enjoyment are the ones that have the smiling muscle that brings the lip corners up but also the muscle around the eye is activated,” explains David Matsumoto, Ph.D., body language expert and founder of Humintell. “What the muscle around the eye does is brings the cheeks up, makes a shiny appearance of the cheeks, gives some people crow’s feet wrinkles, and thins out the eyelids and eye cover fold.” These smiles are all about expressing positive emotions like elation, excitement, and amusement. In a reward smile, the muscles in your mouth, cheeks, eyes, and eyebrows are engaged, resulting in a dopamine-inducing effect in either the sender or perceiver that makes behavior more likely to be reinforced. “On the broadest level, you’ve got smiles that are of true enjoyment and then you have smiles of non-enjoyment,” Matsumoto notes. “Social smiles, or non-enjoyment smiles, don’t have the eye muscles activated.” Think of these smiles as the somewhat strained, usually no-tooth smile you give a person you pass on the street or make eye contact with. While they’re not necessarily the most genuine, Matsumoto notes they play an important role as a common courtesy, displaying openness to those around you and general friendliness. In this type of smile, your eyebrows and cheeks are lifted, similar to the Duchenne smile, but the smile itself loses its symmetry and looks more like a smirk or sneer. Where Duchenne smiles and even social smiles are considered a sign of pleasantry and positivity, dominance smiles definitely are not. They’re associated with superiority, condescension, confidence, and boasting. In a dampened smile, a smile that would naturally look big is subdued by pulling the corners of the mouth down. A qualifier smile includes a slight head nod with the head tilting down and sideways, almost looking down at the person on the receiving end. As such, qualifier smiles can come off like the condescending counterpart to polite smiles. Pan Am smiles are basically attempting to be Duchenne smiles, but they come across as distinctly forced or fake. They can also look over the top, because in most cases, the person smiling is overextending themselves in an effort to keep a smile on their face. And in a more high-stakes lying situation, as observed in 2012 research7 on people who turned out to be murderers, particular patterns of facial expressions were seen in those who were lying. Namely, the muscles around their mouths were activated. According to some research, our ability to smile during pain or difficult emotions can have a reassuring, social component for those around us. It’s also believed smiling through pain or grief can have protective benefits. Additional research has pointed to an interesting explanation for this: Intentionally smiling causes the same brain activity as an involuntary or natural smile9. In this sense, you really can fake it till you make it. And those feel-good emotions that can be elicited by a smile can also, in turn, help your immune system, bringing your body into a state of greater balance, which encourages proper immune function. All that is to say: smiling, intentional or not, is great for your physical and mental health. Once we become aware of the types of smiles, we can better read, understand, and communicate with people. (Though direct, honest communication never hurts!) We may not be able to see people’s full faces when we’re out and about these days, but now when you see someone’s eyes light up behind their mask, you’ll know they’re smiling.
