Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Attractiveness of a Smile

Krumhuber, Manstead & Kappas studied whether the speed of one's smile can affect how s/he is percieved. A group of 100 participatns (half male half female) were shown synthetic faces smiling at a rate of either .1 of a second or .5 of a second from onset to full smile. The faces would also be male, female, looking straight, tilted to the left orn right. The Participants had to rate these faces on attractiveness, dominence, flirtatousness, fake and trustworthiness. The long onset smile (.5 second) was found to be more flirtatous, trustworthy and and attractive; if the head was tilted to the right the trustworthiness and attractiveness ratings were higher. Mens faces were seen as more dominant than the womens faces while smiling across the board. Apparently, if a woman is looking for a date she only needs to tilt her head and smile in order to get the message out there. This could mean trouble for those of us that are naturally smiley women.

2 comments:

  1. I found this post very interesting! I didn't know a person could read this much into a smile. I will think twice before smiling and tilting my head at a boy! lol

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  2. Haha interesting indeed! I wonder what makes the preference for tilted heads and smiling. The smiling makes sense--who wants to talk to someone who is more likely to reject social interaction? But, I wonder why the tilting is the key?

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