The psychology of smiling

I was a child when I read an American newspaper that changed my life. I can’t remember the name of the publication, but I remember the name of the author whose article I read: Kaukab Siddique.

I also remember the content of the article. “Whenever we looked at his face,” he quoted the companions of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), “he was smiling.”

What!

My religious teachers in Africa never taught me this. And as a child, I had the most variegated set of teachers -from Sufi to the Salaf.

Scholars themselves didn’t smile! All they did was to whip us as children in the madrasah. We took lessons in the ever-presence of a whip – as the teachers brandished it wherever they went.

But the Prophet smiled!

When we are happy, we naturally smile. But research has shown that the opposite is also true. Smiling also makes us happy. This means, if you are sad and you smile, you would become happy.

The evidence for this was the research conducted by psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman.

Out of 170 participants, half of them were asked to smile, and then they were subjected to stressful tasks while the researchers monitor their heart rates and stress levels.

Results showed that those who were asked to smile recorded lower heart rate and less stress than others. The bigger the smile the more the effect.

Surprisingly, even those who were not asked to smile but were forced to smile by the placement of chopsticks in their mouth finished the tasks feeling more content and less stressed than the group with a neutral expression.

Here’s part of the abstract of the paper:

“We investigated whether covertly manipulating positive facial expressions would influence cardiovascular and affective responses to stress. Participants (N = 170) naive to the purpose of the study completed two different stressful tasks while holding chopsticks in their mouths in a manner that produced a Duchenne smile, a standard smile, or a neutral expression. Awareness was manipulated by explicitly asking half of all participants in the smiling groups to smile (and giving the other half no instructions related to smiling). Findings revealed that all smiling participants, regardless of whether they were aware of smiling, had lower heart rates during stress recovery than the neutral group did, with a slight advantage for those with Duchenne smiles [felt smile]. Participants in the smiling groups who were not explicitly asked to smile reported less of a decrease in positive affect during a stressful task than did the neutral group. These findings show that there are both physiological and psychological benefits from maintaining positive facial expressions during stress.”

(A Duchenne smile involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms crow’s feet around the eyes). The Duchenne smile has been described as “smizing”, as in “smiling with the eyes”.’)

Sarah Pressman (one of the researchers) said, “The next time you are stuck in traffic or are experiencing some other type of stress, you might try to hold your face in a smile for a moment. Not only will it help you ‘grin and bear it’ psychologically, but it might actually help your heart health as well!”

Now, we understand that smiling makes the smiler happy. But why would the Prophet say a “smile is charity?”

Here’s the reason:

“In addition to lifting mood and reducing stress,” Andrew Merle wrote for the Huffington Post, “other research has shown that people who smile are thought to be more friendly and likeable, and smiling actually makes those around you cheerier as well.”

Smiling makes other people happy and helps their hearts! That’s why it’s charity.

How does this happen?

Here’s one explanation in the British Council Voices magazine article “What’s the science behind a smile?”:

“When our smiling muscles contract, they fire a signal back to the brain, stimulating our reward system, and further increasing our level of happy hormones, or endorphins. In short, when our brain feels happy, we smile; when we smile, our brain feels happier.”

These insights can also be applied to raising children in three ways:

Remember the study that says smiling makes other people happy? So if you smile at children, it makes them happy and they are likely to reward you with positive behaviour in return.

Two, smiling also reduces stress and when you smile at your children, they smile back, reducing their own stress.

This is important because stress has a devastating effect on children. In his book, “How Children Succeed,” Paul Tough reports studies on adversity and how childhood stress can harm people for life.

“The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex,” Paul Tough wrote, “which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. …the key channel through which early adversity causes damage to developing bodies and brains is stress.”

So if smiling can reduce stress and thereafter future adversity, we should give our children the charity of smiling.

Three, smiling makes you look more friendly, therefore, more approachable and accessible. Every parent wants their child to confide in them. If you smile, they are more likely to do that. If you don’t, they will confide in others, including strangers.

One question that a primary school student once asked me and made me proud was: “Sir, why are you always smiling?”

Before that observation, I didn’t know that I was always smiling. That was then. Now I struggle to smile because of the many challenges in life. However, the Prophet who was a religious, as well as a political leader, smiled “all the time”. So we can’t allow distractions of life to prevent us from being cheerful.

I hope that from now on, all of us will smile more with our children.

This is because the Prophet was more cheerful when he was with children. In fact, the children and the people around him reported that, “when we looked at him, he was always smiling.” And they flocked to him.

You should smile even for selfish reasons because your likability increases when you do.

My mother once gushingly told me about a politician they called Mai Dariya (the one who smiles – on his campaign posters) and why she supported him during an election.