Smiles and Laughter Are a Way of Bonding
Robert Provine found that laughing was more than 30 times as likely to occur in participants in a social situation than in a solitary setting. Laughter, he found, has less to do with jokes and funny stories and more to do with building relationships. He found that only 15% of our laughter has to do with jokes. In Provine's studies, participants were more likely to speak to themselves when alone than they were to laugh. Participants were videotaped watching a humorous video clip in three different situations: alone, with a same-sex stranger and with a same-sex friend.
Only 15% of our laughter has to do with jokes. Laughter has more to do with bonding.
Even though no differences existed between how funny the participants felt the video clip was, those who watched the amusing video clips alone laughed significantly less than did those who watched the video clip with another person present, whether it was a friend or a stranger. The frequency and time spent laugh
Humour Sells
Karen Machleit, professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati's College of Business Administration, found that adding humour to advertisements increases sales. She found that humour makes it more likely that consumers will accept an advertiser's claims and increases source credibility, so that a funny ad with a famous person becomes even more readily accepted.
The Permanent Down-Mouth
The opposite to pulling up the corners of the mouth to show happiness is pulling both corners downward to show the Down-Mouth expression. This is done by the person who feels unhappy, despondent, depressed, angry or tense. Unfortunately, if a person holds these negative emotions throughout their lifetime, the corners of the mouth will set into a permanent down position. In later life, this can give a person an appearance similar to a bulldog. Studies show that we stand further away from people who have this expression, give them less eye contact and avoid them when they are walking towards us. If you disover that the Down-Mouth has crept into your repertoire, practise smiling regularly, which will not only help you avoid looking like an angry canine in later life, but will make you feel more positive. It will also help you avoid frightening little children and being thought of as a grumpy old cow.
The Magic of Smiles and Laughter
ing were significantly greater in both situations involving other person than when the participant was alone. Laughter occurred much more frequently during social interaction. These suits demonstrate that the more social a situation is, the more often people will laugh and the longer each laugh will last.
The Definitive Book of Body Language
The Down-Mouth expression can become a permanent facial feature. Our intuition tells us to stay away from those with a Down-Mouth expression.
Smiling Advice For Women
Research by Marvin Hecht and Marianne La France from Boston University has revealed how subordinate people smile more in the presence of dominant and superior people, in both friendly and unfriendly situations, whereas superior people will smile only around subordinate people in friendly situations. This research shows that women smile far more than men in both social and business situations, which can make a woman appear to be subordinate or weak in an encounter with unsmiling men. Some people claim that women's extra smiling is the result of women historically being placed by men into subordinate roles, but other aresearch shows that by the age of eight weeks, baby girls smile far more than baby boys, so it's probably inborn as opposed to learned. The likely explanation is that smiling fits neatly into women's evolutionary role as pacifiers and nurturers. It doesn't mean a woman can't be as authoritative as a man; but the extra smiling can make her look less authoritative.
The Magic of Smiles and Laughter
Women's extra smiling is probably hardwired into the brain.
Social psychologist Dr Nancy Henley, at UCLA, described a woman's smile as 'her badge of appeasement' and it is often used to placate a more powerful male. Her research showed that, in social encounters, women smile 87% of the time versus 67% for men and that women are 26% more likely to return smiles from the opposite sex. An experiment using 15 photographs of women showing happy, sad and neutral faces were rated for attractiveness by 257 respondents. The women with the sad expressions were considered the least attractive. Pictures of unsmiling women were decoded as a sign of unhappiness while pictures of unsmiling men were seen as a sign of dominance. The lessons here are for women to smile less when dealing with dominant men in business or to mirror the amount of smiling that men do. And if men want to be more persuasive with women, they need to smile more in all contexts.
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