Behavioral Markers and Recognizability of the Smile of Enjoyment

This chapter reports a study that selects a sample of smiles on the basis of the best substantiated marker of enjoyment (Duchenne's) and determines whether such smiles also showed the limited duration marker. The data are consistent with the proposal that smiles with the Duchenne marker act more like emotional facial actions. Another study addressed the question of whether the subtle markers of enjoyment can operate as social signals. Although the second study has shown that observers can distinguish enjoyment from nonenjoyment smiles, it does not tell whether each type of smile conveys different information about the emotional state of the person when observers' attention is not focused on just the smile; this was examined in Study 3. It showed that subjects in the solitary situation were rated as generally less positive than subjects in the social interaction condition. In general, the results of these studies demonstrate that there are not only multiple physical differences between enjoyment smiles and nonenjoyment smiles, but also that these differences are observable and influence subjective impressions. Some thoughts on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), dynamic markers of emotion, and baseball are discussed.