Sudhakar Jha
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Written By: Sudhakar Jha | Published : September 11, 2018 8:12 PM IST
Behavioural Ecology Theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions; that theory claims that cheerfulness is neither necessary nor sufficient for smiling © Shutterstock
We all believe that a person is happy because he is smiling when conversing with someone, but a new study led by body language expert, Dr. Harry Witchel, Discipline Leader in Physiology at BSMS, has shown that it isn't the case all the time.
For the research, he picked 44 individuals aged between 18 to 35 and engaged them in a geography quiz game consisting of nine difficult questions so that they got the answer wrong. The participants had to answer the questions in front of the computer, while their faces were video recorded. After the quiz, the participants were asked to rate their subjective experience using a range of emotions which included bored, interested and frustrated. On the other hand, the team analysed the facial expressions of the individuals in order to judge their smile based on a scale of between 0 to 1.
Dr. Witchel claimed that the way people often behaved during one-to-one Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) was as if they were socially engaged. Dr Witchel said in a statement, "According to some researchers, a genuine smile reflects the inner state of cheerfulness or amusement. However, Behavioural Ecology Theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions; that theory claims that cheerfulness is neither necessary nor sufficient for smiling."
The team had kept the emotion that was most associated with smiling as engagement rather than happiness or frustration.
And in the end of the study, it was shown that the participants did not tend to smile during the period when they were trying to figure out the answers. But smiled after the game informed about their answers. Surprisingly, it was seen that participants smiled more often when they got their answer wrong.
Dr. Witchel added in the study, "Our study showed that in these Human-Computer Interaction experiments, smiling is not driven by happiness; it is associated with subjective engagement, which acts like a social fuel for smiling, even when socialising with a computer on your own. During these computerised quizzes, smiling was radically enhanced just after answering questions incorrectly. This behaviour could be explained by self-ratings of engagement, rather than by ratings of happiness or frustration."
