Turning a smile into a science

This paper's science page is always a good read, and last Monday it had an amusing and informative piece on the subject, funnily enough, of smiling. I read it with more than usual interest because I suffer from a rare genetic disorder which, whenever anyone points a camera in my direction and asks me to look relaxed and happy, causes me instead to look like I'm having a leg amputated out-of-picture.

This is an unusual state of affairs for an Irish person. Irish people are world-famous for smiling (especially with their eyes); and this is probably because it's a form of greeting which doesn't require physical contact. We're pretty good at shaking hands, admittedly; but, as science columnist William Reville wrote in the article, we have no time at all for the cheek-kissing and hugging of other Europeans.

I'm reminded of a funeral I covered a few years ago, down the country. The church was packed and I was standing outside with other late-comers, although we could hear everything that was going on within. And it was going on along predictable lines until it came to the bit about offering each other the sign of peace.

Unfortunately, the priest was a relative of the family who had recently returned from abroad, maybe from one of the Latin countries.

So instead of just routinely doing the sign-of-peace thing, he asked each member of the congregation to turn to the person nearest "and hold that person in your arms for a moment".

I don't know what happened inside the church, but I can't understate the horror with which the suggestion was greeted among the (overwhelmingly male) contingent outside. Silent horror, of course; nobody so much as blinked in the long-drawn-out moment while we considered what course of action to take. If you listened hard enough, though, you could actually hear squirming.

I'd been living in the city long enough to at least consider hugging the big countryman nearest me, but a half glance at him was enough to tell me to cop myself on.

So I held my nerve as the moment passed. And then, simultaneously, everyone just shook hands, as though nothing had happened. You could tell what people were thinking: it had been only 20 years or so since the church first required hand-shaking from the congregation. This priest had been rushing things.

Anyway, getting back to the subject of smiling, and why I have trouble with it. I said the problem is a genetic one, but of course that's just a cover for the truth; which is that my childhood experiences with women are to blame.

One of the earliest family photographs I haven't yet destroyed shows me bawling my head off in the company of my three older sisters who - if I may hazard a guess - had all been ordering me to smile for the camera. I was about two years old, but the scene would have been repeated many times over the following few years; and at that age, as the respected child psychologist Hillary Clinton has pointed out, the competing demands of women can have severe long-term effects.

It has caused problems in my marriage, needless to say: namely that every time my wife and I go on holiday, we come back with photographs of me looking like I've been held at gunpoint throughout the trip.

My wife is one of these sunny people whose smile is wider than the space available for her passport photograph. She's also an enthusiastic photographer in her own right: at the risk of sounding like Mister Sarcastic, I always have plenty of time to compose myself while she's choosing the right angle of whatever architectural treasure she chooses to frame me against.

She'll ask me to pose in front of - say - the ruins of Pompeii, and I'll start out smiling; but by the time we get home and have the pictures developed, the ruins will always look more cheerful than I do. And that's when I try to look happy: when I try to look interesting, I come out like I was having my picture taken by the Turkish police after being caught smuggling drugs.

As William Reville explained, smiles are controlled by several facial muscles, but mainly the risorius and the zygomaticus. These contract in an organised manner, and are in turn controlled by carefully-orchestrated, genetically pre-programmed nervous impulses; which are triggered in the first place by happy emotions and also, for reasons scientists don't understand, by the word "cheese".

This only goes for sincere smiles, of course. When a lawyer smiles, for example, he doesn't use any of these muscles (or if he does, you probably get billed for it). And it doesn't look like the Mona Lisa was using many of them either; even though her smile, which illustrated the article, is arguably the world's most famous.

Indeed, it accompanied a second science feature I read this week, in Wednesday's London Times, which pointed out that most portrait sitters (except scientists!) instinctively project the left side of the face - as Mona did - because that's the one controlled by the right side of the brain, the seat of the emotions.

Ironically, some scholars now think that the famous grin was influenced by something as mundane as dental problems, namely those of Leonardo da Vinci's model - Lisa di Anton Maria di Noldo Ghirardini. With a name like that, she had problems enough; but apparently, she also had most of her teeth extracted during the period she spent sitting for the portrait.

I have no such excuse, of course. I've never had a single tooth extracted during any of wife's holiday photograph compositions - although one or two have fallen out naturally while I was waiting.

That's all I have to say about the subject, for the moment. Except to add that if anyone recognises the guy in the picture on top of this column, the Turkish police would like to hear from you.