Happy at Last
Last but not least, you'll learn what the happy mouth looks like. It's no great mystery, actually: Happy mouths smile. They laugh. They don't stick their tongues out at other people. But are there varying degrees of how pleased a mouth can appear?
Smiling
There's nothing more pleasing than a genuine smile — it warms your heart to see someone you care about grinning broadly. And when the real smile belongs to you, you physically feel at ease, if only for a moment.
Everyone knows that there are real smiles and fake smiles. Julia Roberts is known for showing her pearly whites in a genuine manner. Beauty pageant contestants generally wear plastic grins. What's the difference — and should it make a difference to you if someone else is flashing you a fake sign of happiness? A real smile has the following characteristics:
The lips move upward.
The nose may crinkle slightly; nostrils may flare.
The muscles around the eyes are fully engaged.
This is what experts call the zygomatic smile (so named for the zygo-matic major muscle, which pulls your cheeks and lips into a genuine smile), and when you see it, it means the other person is really, truly happy. If your interviewer or date gives you a fully engaged zygomatic smile, you can sit back and relax a bit — things are going your way!
By contrast, the fake smile has these characteristics:
The lips move laterally.
The muscles and features of the rest of the face remain somewhat stagnant.
The key to the genuine smile is truly in how the eyes behave. Although you can surely learn to fake a real smile by consciously contracting your facial muscles, you can be certain that someone whose lips are moving sideways and whose eyes remain rather blank is faking that grin for your benefit — perhaps out of politeness (as may be the case on a first date that isn't going all that well), perhaps in an effort to deceive you (as may be the case when you're talking to a used-car salesman). Assess the situation carefully and proceed with caution.
One of the characteristics of a sincere smile are lips that curl upward.
In a fake smile, the lips move laterally toward the ears instead of curling upward.
Laughing
What place does laughter have in body language? People either find something amusing and they laugh at it, or they don't. How can you read into that, other than to say that some people have a more developed (or more immature) sense of humor than others?
A person with a great laugh is generally perceived to be a friendly sort. He's often the hit of any gathering, simply because people love to hear his chuckle — it makes them feel good because it makes them laugh, too. Now, there's the crux of laughter — the way it spreads. And it doesn't spread the way a fad does — people don't simply copy one another's laugh attacks, they actually experience real amusement at watching someone else guffaw. Everyone's experienced this sort of thing, and usually at the absolute worst time.
Perhaps in your fourth-grade classroom, your teacher sat down in her chair and it made a most unflattering squeaking sound. You did your best to ignore it, but then you saw your best friend trying to stifle his own laughter. Pretty soon, the two of you were watching each other trying not to laugh and finding it more difficult to keep a straight face. At this point, the laughter was as much about the laughter itself as it was about the teacher's indignity. (If only you'd been able to articulate this to the principal.)
A laugh doesn't need to be loud in order to draw other people in. It's the act itself that makes other people view the laugher as a lighthearted, good-natured person.
A person who doesn't laugh often is thought of as being uptight, even if she merely happens to have a very reserved sense of humor. Just as boisterous laughter makes a person appear sociable, a complete absence of laughter can make people think you're a humorless hermit-type. If you don't laugh much, at least learn to smile at the appropriate times — and make sure that smile appears genuine!
The (m)oral of the story: When people want to know what's on your mind, they'll look to your mouth, so give your public what they're looking for. It's hard to mistake authentic movements of the mouth, so don't be surprised if people are suddenly reading your communications a lot more clearly. It's not that you've become a great orator — you've just learned to put your message where your mouth is.
