The Hindu : International : Spotting fake smiles

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 03, 2005

International

International

Spotting fake smiles

LONDON: Internet users could be about to decide what makes a smirk work. They will try and spot the difference between true smiles and fake grins: the intuitive will know almost at a glance. An individual's capability for telling smiles from wiles could throw light on one of humanity's most mysterious emotions. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, England, will start a large-scale experiment examining intuition. To mark the Edinburgh International Science Festival, he will invite people to go online at www.sciencefestival.co.uk, study some commissioned portraits of smiling persons, and decide which smiles are genuine and which fake. ``They will see 10 faces masked off in various ways. They will only get the top of the face, the bottom, the left or the right. We are looking to see what sorts of people are good at detecting fake from genuine smiles, and what parts of the face give out most information. The eyes are incredibly important, the mouth not quite so important. What hasn't been looked at is left versus right side of the face ... we tend to base most of our decisions about someone on the right side of their face. We're looking to see if that is also true of smiling.'' —

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