Being HAPPY can be Complicated
THE KEY CONCEPT : The bittersweet smile combines a distressed brow with a smiling mouth. |
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Figures 1 & 2. Florian Thauvin, Player #20, inspired this blog. Take a careful look at Figure 2, the spectacular image of the emotion-drenched French Squad celebrating their victory in the 2018 World Cup. While nearly everyone laughs or shouts with joy, their happy faces displaying their upper teeth but not their lower (the textbook pattern with laughing), Thauvin stands out from the crowd. As you can see in Figure 1, his upper face is clenched in the pattern most associated with crying. For reasons that are not well understood, extreme joy can trigger reflexes associated with grief, as is obviously happening here. In such overwhelming moments, like winning a world championship, people experience a superabundance of emotional energy, and it finds outlets through a variety of channels – including physical action, like jumping for joy, and crying.
| No facial expression displays human complexity more distinctly than the conflicted smile, that mixed expression where the lower face appears happy, while the upper face expresses grief or anxiety. It’s one of most common nuances of the smile, and it only requires the slightest twist of the inner eyebrow to be detected. This bittersweet expression proves the point that one subtle inflection can alter our reading of the emotional tone of an entire face. |  Figure 3. This crying older man displays eyes identical to those of the laughing soccer player; it's the mouths that differ. |
COMPLEX CHLOE (aka "Carrie," 2013)
Now, study Figures 4 & 5 below. What’s particularly striking is how tiny the difference is between the two faces of young actress, Chloë Grace Moretz, and yet how different her two facial expressions. In Figure 4, (author-manipulated) we are highly sensitive to the twist of the inner ends of her eye brows where I gave her a slight curl (distress pattern). This is a very common expression in the “real world”, and difficult to pin down as every version of this "grief/happy" pattern is unique to each face. The message that we take away from my version of Chloë's mixed-up face is not clear-cut either and elicited a variety of tester responses, as noted in the captions below.
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Figures 4 & 5 show that it doesn't take much to go from a simple to a complex smile. In a test of 50 viewers, roughly half thought Chloë's expression in author-manipulated Figure 4 was happy, while “embarrassed”, “awkward”, and “anxious” was the most common response among the rest. Figure 5 is the "real" Chloë' with an authentically happy smile for a photographer at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.
AWKWARD EMOJI
By contrast, despite its charming smile, the curled-up eyebrows and oblique eye margin on the emoji in Figure 6 makes this character read more as distressed than joyful.
Figure 6. The author created this character by combining the smiling mouth of a happy emoji with the down-turned eyebrows of a sad emoji. This combined expression creates a dominant aspect of nervousness or embarrassment (it’s possible the pink cheeks helped), which 50% of test respondents chose as its facial expression. Only 28% thought the face looked happy.
ANGUISHED AMANDA
There is something very compelling about the conflicted smile, which excites our sympathies more than a merely happy face. The person whose face betrays a struggle between several strong emotions seems vulnerable and accessible, smiling through their tears. Clearly Amanda Knox (Fig. 7) had a great deal to feel conflicted about during her first public appearance after being released from four years in custody. By editing her eyebrows back to neutral (see Figure 8), I removed that extra layer of emotion, and her smile loses the complexity which drew us into the original image.
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Figures 7 & 8 show Amanda Knox with a complex and a simple smile, respectively. In Figure 7, 46% of testers agreed that she was happy; the other 48% chose Sad, Nervous, Embarrassed or Confused as her expression. In Figure 8, where I have "un-kinked" her eyebrows, 82% of testers chose Joy as her expression.
MISCHIEVIOUS MOANA
The animators who created the feisty heroine of Disney’s "Moana" used a conflicted smile to suggest the main character’s skeptical side – friendly, but with an edge (Fig. 9). In Figure 10, I edited out the distressed eyebrows which makes her much less interesting, and much more conventional.
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Figures 9 & 10 also show a complex and a simple smile. Moana was beautifully expressive, as in Figure 9, where 40% of testers thought she was Perplexed compared to 36% who thought she expressed Joy. By contrast, in photo-manipulated Figure 10 with neutral eyebrows, 78% of testers read Joy as Moana's expression.
The bottom line here is how adaptable the smile is to complexity, with mixed emotions above and below. In future blogs, I’ll look at the smile combined with anger and surprise.
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Credits : Figures 1, 2 & 3: Figure 2: Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images of French Squad after winning FIFA 2018 World Cup - https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/15/france-croatia-world-cup-final-match-report; Figure 3: Photo of crying man: https://www.hankermag.com/emotional-dads-seeing-their-daughter-as-bridge/; Figure 4: Author-manipulated face of Chloë; Figure 5: Photo of Chloë Grace Moretz by Georges Biard from Cannes Film Festival, 2014; Figure 6: Mixed-up emoji developed from https://carwad.net/smiley-sad; Figure 7: Photo of newly-exonerated Amanda Knox from AFP Getty Images- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/amanda-knox-60-minutes-interview-254239; Figure 8: Author-manipulated face of Amanda; Figure 9: Face of Moana from the movie "Moana," a 3D computer-animated film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures, 2016; Figure 10: Author-manipulated face of Moana.
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