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According to new research at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), it is widely believed that smiling indicates happiness. A new study led by body language expert Dr Harry Witchel, Discipline Leader in Physiology at BSMS, shows that the way people often behave during one-to-one Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) is as if they were socially engaged.
The research involved asking participants aged 18-35 to play a geography quiz game consisting of difficult questions so that they often got the answer wrong. Participants interacted with a computer alone in a room while their faces were video recorded. After the quiz, the participants were asked to rate their subjective experience using a range of 12 emotions including ‘bored’, ‘interested’ and ‘frustrated’.
Meanwhile, their spontaneous facial expressions were then computer analysed frame by frame in order to judge how much they were smiling based on a scale of between 0 to 1. A genuine smile reflects the inner state of cheerfulness or amusement. However, Behavioural Ecology Theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions; that theory claims that cheerfulness is neither necessary nor sufficient for smiling.
The study showed that in these Human-Computer Interaction experiments, smiling is not driven by happiness; it is associated with subjective engagement, which acts like a social fuel for smiling, even when socialising with a computer on your own. Statistically, the emotion that was most associated with smiling was ‘engagement’ rather than ‘happiness’ or ‘frustration’. However, participants did smile right after the computer game informed them if their answer was correct or wrong, and surprisingly, participants smiled more often when they got the answer wrong.