People smile for all sorts of reasons, only one of which is to signal happiness.
— Nick Morgan

Why we smile? We have a sense of humor.

Smiles still mean something, don’t they?

To answer our question it is best to quote the paragraph at the top of page 161 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution: “All primates, including humans, use their facial features and muscles to generate expressions. Our own perception tends to label facial expressions as outward manifestations of an emotive state; a smile shows happiness. Like many kinds of behaviour, facial expressions help to regulate social relationships. At this level, the smile (or its simian equivalent) is a display that disarms aggression and eases social interactions.”

Being able to read “nonverbal communication“—body language—is essential in business dealings. Problem is, we usually interpret a smile or lack of eye contact through an emotional screen, not a scientific one. Sometimes a smile is a sign of happiness—and sometimes it’s a flash of contempt.

People smile when they’re happy. People smile for all sorts of reasons, only one of which is to signal happiness. Ekman describes many kinds of smiles, from the “felt” or true smile to the fear smile, the contempt smile, the dampened smile, the miserable smile, and a number of others. Daniel McNeill, author of The Face: A Natural History, says, “Smiling is innate and appears in infants almost from birth….The first smiles appear two to twelve hours after birth and seem void of content. Infants simply issue them, and they help parents bond. We respond; they don’t know what they’re doing. The second phase of smiling begins sometime between the fifth week and fourth month. It is the “social smile,” in which the infant smiles while fixing its gaze on a person’s face.”

Since the dawn of time, people always find human humour a most funny thing. We have an individual human smile. A joke, or humour, told or watched by a single family group, might have some of the group crying with laughter, whilst others, within the same room, might not find anything remotely amusing at all.

Some of this human humour, will travel the entire globe and be found amusing by many. Some of this humour, will be restricted only to an audience, of a particular area. Sometimes, the jokes themselves, will be altered slightly, to suit the particular area in which they are told. However, or wherever it is portrayed, humour will remain a most personal, human thing.

It is interesting, that all this amusing humour, will also change with time itself. Whilst something like a comedy T.V. show or joke, may be found to be amusing by many today, they could also have a very short lived time frame, when the audience of the next generation, will have changed their perspective, of what they, individually, find funny.

I like smiling and I honestly believe that a Smile can turn someone’s awful day into a good one. You never know what your smile means to someone, even if you dont know the person, a smile is contagious! It often prevents a quarrel if you smile at people who are rude to you.

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