The Distress Smile and its Cognitive Antecedents
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The Distress Smile and its Cognitive Antecedents Aditya Singh1 · Jaison A. Manjaly1 Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper investigates the paradoxical finding that physical pain in certain social situations makes people smile. A number of models have been proposed to explain emotional behaviour, and we tested some important predictions they make regarding the mental antecedents and cognitive properties that could characterize such distress smiles, specifically ones that occur in informal and non-serious social situations. We assessed impulsivity and controllability of the smile, its accompanying emotions, dependence on effortful appraisal, communicative functions, and whether it is goal dependent or stimulus driven. To do this we made students receive and induce physical pain to each other on the upper arm, and varied the following conditions in which the pain was administered: social distance between participants, hierarchical relation between the participants, attentional load, and instructions to make no movements. We also assessed the presence of happiness and amusement (or mirth), and whether they were correlated with the distress smiles. We concluded that the distress induced smile, at least for males in informal social situations, is a goal dependent impulsive behaviour that communicates appeasement and non-hostility. Keywords Pain · Smile · Appraisal · Automaticity · Appeasement · Amusement
Introduction Why do people smile when they make an embarrassing error (Goldenthal et al. 1981), or when they discuss their recently bereaved spouse (Keltner and Bonanno 1997), or when in sheer physical pain (Kunz et al. 2013)? Studies investigating the correlation between hedonic valence and facial electromyography activation have found that activity in the zygomatic major, the muscle responsible for smiles, increases with an increase in felt positive valence, but it also tends to accompany extremely aversive stimuli (Larsen et al. 2008). Common sense view would indicate that deeply aversive situations ought not to induce us to smile. Yet a number of researchers have made this paradoxical discovery, often unexpectedly (Bavelas et al. 1986; Kunz et al. 2009). The dominant model of emotional behavior, the affect program theory, considers aversion induced smiles as non-emotional and
* Aditya Singh [email protected] 1
Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
proposes that they are produced deliberately to hide one’s true feelings (Ekman and Friesen 1982). Most investigations of smiles in distress (or ‘distress smiles’) follow this paradigm. An early demonstration of such a distress-induced ‘non-emotional smile’ is a study by Friesen (1972) (as cited in Ekman and Friesen 1982). American and Japanese participants were made to watch a stress-inducing film, and their facial expressions were coded. While watching the film alone, b
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