Psych Central News
Real Smiles, Fake Smiles: What’s the Difference?
New research suggests that not all smiles are created equal, that people respond differently to smiles that are not genuine. In fact, differing responses may reflect the unique social value of genuine smiles.
“These findings give us the first clear suggestion that the basic processes that guide responses to reward also play a role in guiding social behavior on a moment-to-moment basis during interactions,” said psychological scientist and lead researcher Dr. Erin Heerey of Bangor University (UK).
The new research is reported in the journal Psychological Science.
“No two interactions are alike, yet people still manage to smoothly coordinate their speech and nonverbal behaviors with those of another person,” Heerey said.
She wondered whether the intrinsic value of different social cues like smiles may play a role in shaping our response to those cues. Polite smiles, for example, typically occur when sociocultural norms dictate that smiling is appropriate.
Genuine smiles, on the other hand, signify pleasure, occur spontaneously and are indicated by engagement of specific muscles around the eye.
If genuine smiles are a form of social reward, Heerey hypothesized, people should be more likely to anticipate genuine smiles than relatively less rewarding polite smiles.
An observational study showed that pairs of strangers getting to know one another not only exchanged smiles, they almost always matched the particular smile type, whether genuine or polite.
However, the response to a partners’ genuine smile was much more rapid, suggesting they were anticipating the genuine smiles.
Similarly, participants in a lab-based study learned key-press associations for genuinely smiling faces faster than those for politely smiling faces. Data from electrical sensors on participants’ faces revealed that they engaged smile-related muscles when they expected a genuine smile to appear but showed no such activity when expecting polite smiles.
Researchers believe the different responses suggest that genuine smiles are more valuable social rewards.
Previous investigation has shown that genuine smiles promote positive social interactions, so learning to anticipate them is likely to be a critical social skill.
One of the novel aspects of the research, said Heerey, is the combination of naturalistic observation and controlled experimentation, which allowed her to explore the richness of real-life social interactions while also affording her the opportunity to investigate possible causal relationships.
Heerey believes that this approach could yield important applications over time.
“As we progress in our understanding of how social interactions unfold, these findings may help to guide the development of interventions for people who find social interactions difficult, such as those with social anxiety, autism, or schizophrenia,” she said.
Source: Association for Psychological Science
Grandfather and grandson smiling photo by shutterstock.
Video Games Can Rev Up Brain’s Use of Visual Input
Duke University researchers discovered gaming not only trains a player’s hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input.
“Gamers see the world differently,” said Greg Appelbaum, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. “They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”
It can be difficult to find non-gamers among college students these days, but from among a pool of subjects participating in a much larger study, the researchers found 125 participants who were either non-gamers or very intensive gamers.
Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second.
After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot.
At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter.
Researchers have known from earlier studies that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the “first-person shooters,” a gamer makes “probabilistic inferences” about what he’s seeing — good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right — as rapidly as he can.
Appelbaum said that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. “They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster,” he said.
In the study, both groups experienced a rapid decay in memory of what the letters had been, but the gamers outperformed the non-gamers at every time interval.
The visual system screens information out from what the eyes are seeing, and data that isn’t used decays quite rapidly, Appelbaum said.
Gamers discard the unused stuff just about as fast as everyone else, but they appear to be starting with more information to begin with.
To investigate this hypothesis, researchers examined three possible reasons for the gamers’ apparently superior ability to make probabilistic inferences. Either they see better, they retain visual memory longer or they’ve improved their decision-making.
Looking at these results, Applebaum said, it appears that prolonged memory retention isn’t the reason.
But the other two factors might both be in play; it is possible that the gamers see more immediately, and they are better able make better correct decisions from the information they have available.
Future research will be directed toward gaining more data from brain waves and MRI imagery to see where the brains of gamers have been trained to perform differently on visual tasks.
This study appears in the current edition of the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics.
Source: Duke University
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