In almost all other species, especially primates, baring one's teeth is a threat or a show of potential force. Are there any cultures in which sm

How Did the "Smile" Become a Friendly Gesture in Humans?

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2024-12-25 05:00:02

In almost all other species, especially primates, baring one's teeth is a threat or a show of potential force. Are there any cultures in which smiling is not considered friendly?

"The evolution of smiles is opaque and, as with many evolutionary accounts of social behavior, fraught with just-soism. Among human babies, however, the 'tooth-baring' smile is associated less with friendship than with fright--which, one might argue, is related to the tooth-baring threats of baboons. On the other hand, a non-toothy, not-so-broad-but-open-lipped smile is associated with pleasure in human infants. Somehow we seem to have taken the fright-threat sort of smile and extended it to strangers as a presumably friendly smile. Maybe it is not as innocent as it seems.

"All cultures recognize a variety of mouth gestures as indexes of inner emotional states. As in our own culture, however, smiles come in many varieties, not all of them interpreted as friendly."

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