Why some grins cheer you up and others make you say “nope nope nope nope nope.”
can be construed as sarcastic. Smiling, historically, wasn’t always something that humans did to emote happiness—and in fact, both Barrett and Mason agree, smiling is pretty American. “I have one friend who is a cultural psychologist who moved here from the Netherlands and she told me that her cheeks ached for a year after she moved here,” Barrett noted.
So who do we have to blame for this stereotype? Who let us believe that smiles equated to happiness, leaving us vulnerable to the effects of this film?None other than our boy Charles Darwin. It was upon discovering the work of French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who used electro-therapy to induce motor movements and gave the “Duchenne smile” its name, that Darwin developed his theory of facial expressions.