A genuine smile may help you form a new friendship or romantic partnership, a new study suggests.
Drawn to positive feelings
That's
because people seem to respond much better to positive emotions when
forming new personal bonds than to negative vibes such as sadness, anger or contempt, according to the researchers.
However, don't try to fake a smile to win someone over, because people can easily identify whether a smile is sincere.
In
one experiment, the researchers found that dating couples could
accurately track their partners' positive emotions. A second experiment
found that participants tended to feel closer to strangers who displayed
positive emotions, and were drawn to positive feelings almost
instinctively.
The investigators also found that people
display positive emotions with a so-called Duchenne smile, which
involves simultaneous movement of two facial muscles around the eyes and
cheeks and primarily occurs when people are sincere and happy.
Others
see this type of smile as sincere and it helps with social bonding.
People are highly aware of this type of smile and are good at "reading" a
fake smile," according to study leader Belinda Campos of the University
of California, Irvine.
The study was published recently in the journal Motivation and Emotion.
"Our
findings provide new evidence of the significance of positive emotions
in social settings and highlight the role that positive emotions display
in the development of new social connections. People are highly attuned
to the positive emotions of others and can be more attuned to others'
positive emotions than negative emotions," Campos said in a journal news
release.
A smile can lead to new relationships
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Oleh
healthandwealth
