Smile and the World Smiles with You
Brain development requires more than just mere exposure. Having found a face as a newborn, what do you then do? As human infants are born so immature, they cannot waddle towards our mothers like birds can for at least another ten months or so. Yet it would appear that young babies are naturally inclined to get a rise out of adults by copying them – or at least responding in a way that adults think is an attempt to imitate. That’s right, if you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby, sometimes they will stick their tongue out right back at you.12 Even baby monkeys do this.13 It’s not the same as bratty children in the rear window of a bus giving you the finger or pulling facial grimaces, but if you wait patiently, a newborn may try to copy your expression. The reason that this is so remarkable is that it means humans enter the world ready for social interaction.
After tongues, comes the smiling. By two months, most infants will readily and spontaneously smile at adults. This is a magical moment for any parent. Brain imaging studies reveal when mothers look at pictures of their own smiling baby in comparison to those of other babies, the circuits in the reward centres deep in their brain known as the nucleus accumbens light up.14 These are the same circuits that get turned on by flowers, chocolate, orgasms and winning the lottery. No wonder social smiling is considered intensely pleasurable.
I vividly remember my own utter surprise and joy when my eldest daughter smiled at me for the first time. It wasn’t so much a smile but a burst of laughter and giggling (she has been laughing at me ever since). Even as an expert on infant behaviour who knew that social smiling can be expected around this time, nothing could prepare me emotionally for my daughter’s first smile which thrilled me and sent me hurrying off to tell anyone who would listen. In some cultures, such as the Navajo of North America, this first social smile of a newborn is a time of celebration and the person who sees this is considered enriched and should hand out gifts to all members of the family. They say the individual has arrived in the tribe.15
With a simple pull of twelve facial muscles, our Machiavellian baby can control the adults around them with a smile. When babies smile at us, we smile back and it feels great!16 This is because smiling triggers the corresponding happy feelings in the emotional centres of our brain that are usually associated with this facial expression. Even forcing a smile by getting someone to bite down on a sideways pencil makes them happier than if they are asked to suck the pencil, which makes them pout.17 Copying each other’s expressions makes us feel differently, which is one reason why emotions can become almost contagious between people. In fact, we tend to only smile when there are others around. In one study, players in a tenpin bowling alley were found to smile only 4% of the time after a good score if they were facing away from their friends but this increased to 42% when they turned round to face them, indicating that this expression is primarily a signal to others18.
Smiling is linked to the development of the brain regions that support social behaviour, which are located towards the front of the brain in a cortical area known as the orbital cortex because it sits over the orbits of the eye sockets. Although smiling has been observed using ultrasound in unborn babies, indicating that it is a hard-wired behaviour, at around two months it operates in combination with the higher order centres of the brain that are recruited for social interaction.19 At two months, the baby is already using a smile to control others.
The built-in capacity for smiling is proven by the remarkable observation that babies who are congenitally both deaf and blind, who have never seen a human face, also start to smile around two months. However, smiling in blind babies eventually disappears if nothing is done to reinforce it. Without the right feedback smiling dies out, just like the following instinct does in goslings. But here’s a fascinating fact: blind babies will continue to smile if they are cuddled, bounced, nudged and tickled by the adult20 – anything to let them know that they are not alone and that someone cares about them. This social feedback encourages the baby to continue smiling. In this way, early experience operates with our biology to establish social behaviours. In fact, you don’t need the unfortunate cases of blind babies to make the point. Babies with sight smile more at you when you look at them or, better still, smile back at them. If you hold a neutral or worse, a still, impassive face, they stop smiling and get quite distressed. By the time the baby is six months old, they will cry at angry faces and frown at those that look sad. Babies expect and prefer adults to smile at them. Who doesn’t? It’s a universal expression first recognized by Charles Darwin as one of the core components of human social interaction.21
Laughing Rats
Laughing and smiling are not just signals for others that we are like them, they are strong emotional drives that bind us together as a social species. They are just some of the mechanisms that begin to integrate the individual into a group. When my infant daughter burst into laughter, she was demonstrating one of the most powerful primitive needs to make contact. Without the ability to laugh and smile, we would be isolated individuals. We use laughter to lubricate awkward social interactions, as a way of signalling that we are easy-going, not aggressive and potentially someone worth investing time and effort in. In short, we use laughter to generate our reflected self because our sense of self depends on what others think of us and being funny is considered by many in our culture as an important measure of who we are. It is one of the reasons that most of us think we have a better than average sense of humour – although statistically, that cannot be true. Very few people would readily admit that they do not have a sense of humour. It’s one of the main attractive features that singles use to describe their attributes in personal ads. People who take themselves too seriously are regarded as cold and distant, whereas those who make us laugh are more likely to be considered warm and approachable.
Without the ability to laugh, it is difficult to imagine how we could ever endure life’s challenges. Even during the worst imaginable atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, there was laughter. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, wrote how laughter was the one thing that helped many survive.22 In his memoir, Terry Anderson, who was held hostage in Lebanon for 2,455 days during the 1980s wrote about how his fellow prisoners coped by using humour.23 One captive told shaggy-dog stories. Another mimicked the guards. The laughter made the unbearable situation bearable. Maybe this is why in the wake of every shocking world event where lives are lost, someone comes up with the inevitable ‘sick’ joke. It’s as if we need laughter as a release mechanism for pent-up anxiety. Freud coined the term ‘gallows humour’ and described how it operated as a defence mechanism when confronted with the prospect of death. In such times, laughter can afflict us like a sneeze that cannot be suppressed. I know this because as a teenager at my own father’s funeral, I was overcome with a fit of giggles that I could not stop – something that I felt guilty about for years until I realized that this was a common reaction to stress.
Psychologist Robert Provine, who has studied the science of laughter,24 reminds us that the mechanisms that generate laughter are largely unconscious and that we do not choose to laugh in the way that we choose to utter a sentence. It is more of a reaction that is triggered by others around us. When others in our group laugh then we laugh, too. Laughter is an emotional state – a feeling that arises from systems that work unconsciously deep in the brain that produce the arousal. But what we find funny depends on how these emotions are triggered, which is the output of the cortical systems that process content. Laughter can be triggered by a joke or it can be caused by something less intellectual and more bodily, such as tickling. Even as an infant, we can share laughter with others and this appears to be one of the primary social mechanisms with which we are equipped. When you tickle your baby and they laugh, they are displaying an ancient evolutionary mechanism – one that is shared by other animals.