Crosswords5 mins ago
Tony Blair's smile
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.The comments that specifically describe Blair's smile are interesting, with some suggesting that it is insincere. If the two extremes are that his smile is 'always fake' or 'always genuine' it's likely that in reality he must fall somewhere in between. I think part of the problem is his overuse of the smile, that he uses it in situations where we would not expect a person to be smiling. This then influences our interpretation of whether any given smile is genuine or not. Researchers have found that we already over estimate our own ability to distinguish a fake smile from a genuine one, probably since Desmond Morris' Manwatching made us all amateur anthropologists, and with Blair's over exposure it's easy to become suspicious of him. Psychologists have devised a method of sorting the fakes from the real with a system called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
You'll find a report here about research from the University of Hertfordshire that investigated men and women's ability to spot fake smiles, along with a link to a self test of twenty smiles that you have to assess.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4436021.stm
Some of them are even scarier than Blair!