The Mystery and Evolution of Smiles

And we’re back! It’s been a while, friends. Hope you enjoyed your fall and your holidays. Thanks so much for re-joining us—we’re super excited to be kicking off a brand-new season of the Many Minds podcast. We thought we’d get things started this year with an audio essay, one partly inspired by some musings and mullings from my parental leave. Hope you enjoy it folks—and we’ll see you again in a couple weeks with our first interview of 2024.

Now on to ‘Dawn of the smile.’ Enjoy!

 A text version of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – Darwin describes his children’s first smiles in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

4:10 – On so-called Duchenne smiles, see this classic investigation. 

5:00 – For a summary of “basic emotions” theory, see any number of Paul Ekman’s writing (e.g., here, here). For a recent articulation of the “social tools” theory, see writings by Alan J. Fridlund (e.g., here). For another influential recent critique of “basic emotions” theory, see here. 

6:00 – For the classic bowling study, see here.

7:00 – For a recent review of facial expressions in blind people, see here. 

7:45 – For a review of smiling and gender (and the importance of “rules and roles”), see here. For one of the studies linking smiliness to historical migration patterns, see here. 

8:30 – For the historical shift in smiling—and its possible relation to the Kodak company—see here. For the yearbook photo analysis, see here. 

9:30 – See Darwin’s discussion of infant laughter in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

10:30 – For Darwin’s observations of laughter and smiles in primates, again, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. See Jan van Hooff’s classic study here. 

11:30 – For the study comparing laughter across the Great Apes, see here. For the study of an “ape-like” stage in human laughter, see here. 

12:30 – For a review of play vocalizations and laughter across species, see here.

13:20 – For the Marina Davila-Ross’s suggestion that laughter and smiles share a common evolutionary source, see here.

13:30 – For research on human infants’ open-mouthed smiles, see here. 

14:00 – For the idea of the “acoustic origin” of the smile, see here.   

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

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