Ever wondered why some of your colleagues keep smiling even after being rebuked by the boss? Well, those untimely grins may be an indication of their frustration, says a new MIT study.
When people guess at how genuine a person’s smile is, or what emotion it’s portraying, we don’t know exactly what cues we’re responding to.
But, the new study found that timing has a lot to do with how people interpret expressions, said study researcher Ehsan Hoque, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
How quickly someone smiles can tell us what they actually mean by it, Hoque said. “Getting the timing right is very crucial if you want to be perceived as sincere and genuine with your smiles,” Hoque was quoted as saying by LiveScience. For their study, the researchers asked participants to act out, or fake, expressions of delight and frustration which were recorded by webcams.
***
‘Men have hardly changed from neanderthals’
London: They may want their girlfriends to be hot and beautiful, but when it comes to finding a mate, men are most likely to seek out women who act dumb as they make easier conquests, researchers say.
A team from University of Texas at Austin who focused on the so-called “sexual exploitability hypothesis” found men are more likely to rate vulnerable-looking women as attractive, lending weight to the idea that men are genetically-programmed to look for “easy” sex.
At their core, the team said, the men had changed little since Neanderthal times, when reproduction was their prime objective, the Daily Mail reported.
For their study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, the team recruited a group of young men and showed them photographs.
— PTI