It is widely believed that smiling means a person is happy, and it usually occurs when they are engaging with another person or group of people. However, a new study led by body language expert Dr Harry Witchel, Discipline Leader in Physiology at BSMS, shows this is not always the case.<\/p>\n Dr Witchel claims that the way people often behave during one-to-one Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) is as if they were socially engaged.<\/p>\n His research involved asking 44 participants aged 18-35 to play a geography quiz game consisting of nine difficult questions so that they often got the answer wrong.<\/p>\n Seated participants interacted with a computer alone in a room while their faces were video recorded.<\/p>\n After the quiz, the participants were asked to rate their subjective experience using a range of 12 emotions including ‘bored’, ‘interested’ and ‘frustrated’.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, their spontaneous facial expressions were then computer analysed frame by frame in order to judge how much they were smiling based on a scale of between 0 to 1.<\/p>\n Dr Witchel said: “According to some researchers, a genuine smile reflects the inner state of cheerfulness or amusement.<\/p>\n “However, Behavioural Ecology Theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions<\/strong>; that theory claims that cheerfulness is neither necessary nor sufficient for smiling<\/strong>.<\/p>\n “Our study showed that in these Human-Computer Interaction experiments, smiling is not driven by happiness; it is associated with subjective engagement<\/strong>, which acts like a social fuel for smiling<\/strong>, even when socialising with a computer on your own.”<\/p>\n Statistically, the emotion that was most associated with smiling was ‘engagement’<\/strong> rather than ‘happiness’ or ‘frustration’.<\/p>\n The frame by frame smile analysis broke down each of the nine questions into a question and answer period.<\/p>\n Participants did not tend to smile during the period when they were trying to figure out the answers.<\/p>\n However, they did smile right after the computer game informed them if their answer was correct or wrong, and surprisingly, participants smiled more often when they got the answer wrong.<\/p>\n Dr Witchel added: “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.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University of Sussex press release: Smiling does not necessarily indicate that we are happy, according to new research at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS). It is widely… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[526,5],"tags":[20,122,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27376"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27376"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27407,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27376\/revisions\/27407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/Smiley-emoji-300x277.jpg\")
Smiling does not necessarily indicate that we are happy<\/strong>, according to new research at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS).<\/p>\n