Smiling and Happiness in Cultural Perspective
Piotr Szarota
Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences
Abstract
Three distinctive smile codes (American, Japanese, and
Polish) have been analysed in detail. Smiling appears to
be closely related to cultural norms and values, in Japan
it would be social harmony, in US, cheerfulness and
friendliness, and in Poland, sincerity. I discuss an idea that
the way a given culture constructs a social act of smiling is
related to the cultural ideas of “happiness”. While American
ethic of cheerfulness is closely connected to the cultural
preoccupation with happiness, which is construed as one
of those internal attributes that are to be pursued and
attained via personal striving, Japanese and Poles understand
happiness as something ephemeral and temporary. I argue
that the motivation for smiling differs from culture to culture,
Americans usually smile to present themselves as happy and
friendly, Japanese want to look agreeable and self-controlled,
and Poles seldom engage in social smiling because in their
view the smile should reflect the inner feelings.
Keywords: smiling, happiness, well-being, cultural scripts,
facial expression
Many theorists and most of the lay people alike assume
that the smile is a good indicator of happiness. The
problem is the smile can be quite easily faked; it could
mask negative emotions, communicate appeasement
or simply indicate good manners. A crucial insight into
this complex nature of smiling emerged from the rather
obscure work of the French anatomist Duchenne de
Boulogne. Although Duchenne’s major work Mecanisme
de la physionomie humaine (1) originally published in 1862
was not translated into English until recently, Charles
Darwin described the ideas of his French colleague in
his own book on emotional expression. Duchenne
distinguished between two physically different types of
smile, a supposedly natural and involuntary “genuine
smile” which (apart from turning up the lips) involve
tension in muscles surrounding the eyes (orbiculares
oculi) and a fake smile, which is produced deliberately
and do not activate the eyes.
In the early 1980s a psychologist Paul Ekman, together
with his long-time collaborator Wallace V. Friesen not
only adopted Duchenne’s proposal but also suggested
three other ways in which genuine smile could be
distinguished from other forms of smiling: by the action
of certain other muscles, by the extent of bilateral
symmetry, and by the timing of the smile (2). Ekman and
Friesen (3) argued that genuine smiles are biologically
programmed honest signals of happiness. Ekman decided
to honor the French anatomist and call this expression
– the Duchenne smile.
Correspondence to: Piotr Szarota, Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences
277
Piotr Szarota
Despite the fact that there is no direct evidence that
Duchenne smiles directly convey spontaneity (some
theorists say it is rather intensity of the stimulus that
make the smile looks more or less “genuine”) there is
a growing body of evidence showing that Duchenne’s
idea really works. Ekman, Friesen and O’Sullivan (4)
found more Duchenne smiles when subjects truthfully
described pleasant feelings than when they claimed to
be feeling pleasant but were actually experiencing strong
negative emotions. Also infants show more Duchenne
smiles when approached by their mothers than when
they were approached by a stranger (5). More recently
Papa and Bonanno (6) showed that Duchenne smiles by
evoking positive emotions in others are able to increase
social integration and in turn reduce distress over time.
Smiling across cultures
The cross-cultural research on smiling has not been
very systematic; probably most known are Ekman’s (7)
studies on universal recognition of basic emotion. He
demonstrated that smile has been easily associated with
happiness by subjects from more than a dozen Western
and non-Western cultures including one isolated,
preliterate culture in New Guinea.
Roughly at the same time Ekman and Friesen pointed
to the cross-cultural differences in smiling. They coined
a term “display rules” referring to social conventions and
cultural norms associated with social appropriateness that
dictates the modification of expression (8). Individuals
and cultures may have display rules that suggest a certain
modification of behavior, but individuals may or may
not behave that way when emotions are spontaneously
aroused.
all smiles; however there might be different cultural
scripts responsible for smiling in different cultures. In
other words while there are no cross-cultural differences
between smiles on semantic level, the grammar of
smiling could be entirely different. In the following
paragraphs I will analyze Japanese, American and Polish
“smile codes”.
Japan: The polite smile
For the first time the specificity of the Japanese smile
was analyzed over hundred years ago by Lafcadio
Hearn (11, p. 659): “It is an elaborate and longcultivated etiquette. It is also a silent language. But
any effort to interpret it according to Western notions
of physiognomical expression would be just about as
successful as an attempt to interpret Chinese ideographs
by their real or fancied resemblance to shapes of familiar
things”.
As Hasada (12) observes the smile which is usually
assumed to be specifically characteristic to Japanese
people is the smile displayed when they actually feel
negative emotions. This is the same masking smile
that has been analysed in the Friesen’s (9) study. Why
do Japanese smile this way? Answering this question I
would refer to the core value of Japanese culture: wa.
Wa is usually translated as “social harmony” or
“concord”. Rohlen (13, quoted in 14, p. 253) offers the
following explication: “Wa is not a metaphor. Nor is it
some abstract or logical part of a system of distinctions.
Rather, it is a quality of relationship […] and it refers to
the cooperation, trust, sharing, warmth, morale and hard
work of efficient, pleasant, and purposeful fellowship”.
Smiling may also be analyzed in terms of cultural
norms, values or scripts, which are characteristic for a
particular region. It could be assumed that such cultural
analyses refer mostly to the deliberate or “unfelt” social
smiling, which can be regulated by etiquette rules.
As Wierzbicka (14) observes wa implies not so much
unity which already achieved as a unity which is desired
and aimed for. Everybody in Japan seems to strive for
wa. To achieve this aim one has to avoid confrontation
and control emotional display. The Japanese are
extremely concerned with other people. Uncontrolled
display of emotion could hurt somebody’s feelings and
ruin social harmony, so masking strategy comes as an
obvious choice. As Hearn (11, p. 668) put it: “It is a
rule of life to turn constantly to the outer world a mien
of happiness, to convey to others as far as possible a
pleasant impression. Even though a heart is breaking, it
is a social duty to smile bravely. On the other hand, to
look serious or unhappy is rude, because this may cause
anxiety or pain to those who love us […]”.
A linguist Anna Wierzbicka (10) states that various
forms of nonverbal communication convey meanings of
the same kind as those encoded in language. She suggests
that all smiles, whether voluntary or involuntary,
sincere or insincere, have a constant core meaning: “I
feel something good now”. This message can apply to
Showing strong emotion could not only result in
hurting other people but also in being ridiculed by others.
Reischauer (15, p. 138) notes that Japanese often find
Americans “immature” because of the frankness which
they express their opinions and feelings. One’s affect
has to be controlled and subdued, the more subdued in
In the Friesen’s (9) study Americans and Japanese
viewed emotion eliciting stimuli in two conditions, first
alone and then with a higher-status experimenter. In
the first condition there were no cultural differences in
displays; in the second the Japanese were more likely
to mask their negative feelings with smiles. Ekman (7)
interpreted these differences to have occurred because
of a Japanese display rule to not show negative emotions
to the higher-status experimenter.
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Smiling and Happiness in Cultural Perspective
emotion a person is, the more he/she is respected (16).
Interestingly this is true of not only socially disruptive
emotions like anger, disgust, or contempt but also strong
expression of joy and other positive feelings especially in
“unfamiliar places” (17).
Another way to achieve social harmony is to show
submission in hierarchical relationships. Japanese
employees often smile while telling superiors about
their mistakes, the students smile to teacher when they
cannot answer the question (12). As Morsbach (18)
observed a pleasant smile is used for a manifestation
of the proper degree of submission. Hasada (12) adds
that by smiling, people can make themselves appear in
the eyes of superiors weak and helpless and this kind of
ingratiating behaviour is usually encouraged in Japan.
US: The cheerful smile
Smiling is very important in the US, as it is important
in Japan; however it is guided by completely different
norms. According to Hofstede (19) US is a world’s
most individualistic culture, and a focus is here on selfpresentation not on maintaining social harmony.
First one should point to the central importance of
positive feelings in American culture, in particular
cheerfulness. The philosophy of individualism defines
cheerfulness as the most beneficial of emotions because
it serves the self (cf. 20). Cheerfulness is not a 20th
century invention; Kotchemidova (20, p. 9) observes
that it has been identified as an American disposition
as early as late 18th century. One of the first Europeans
who commented on the “good humour of Americans”
was British journalist William Cobbett, who emigrated
to the States in 1792 (20).
In US cheerfulness is regarded as socially effective and
individually beneficial. It penetrated not only personal
relationships, but also business and service sector, the
political space, and popular culture. Even the immigrants
from the gloomy Europe had their part in spreading
the “good news”; one of the most beautiful hymns to
cheerfulness was composed by Charles Chaplin:
“Smile thou your heart is aching,
Smile even thou it’s breaking,
When there are clouds in the sky
You’ll get by,
If you smile
through your fear and sorrow,
You’ll see the sun come shining through for you
Light up your face with gladness,
Hide every trace of sadness,
Although a tear may be ever so near,
That’s the time,
You must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying,
You’ll find that life is still worth-while,
If you just smile... [...]
As Kotchemidova (20) asserts the display of
cheerfulness has increased with the development of
media and technology. The American media industry
invented special devices to induce cheerfulness, like
the “laugh track” accompanying TV sitcoms (20). An
American clinical psychologist Barbara Held (21) speaks
of the tyranny of the positive attitude in US, which is
evident in culture’s iconography, popular music and
of course in a huge inventory of self-help books: “We
are now literally bombarded with messages from many
sectors of society that exhort us to smile and look on the
bright side, to keep our chins up, and (of course) to have
a nice day, no matter how hard life gets. We must do this
especially when life is at its hardest”.
Another American value which seems to be closely
associated with the cultural rules for smiling is
friendliness. The American etiquette obliges everyone
to be nice and friendly. “There is a strong preference to
preserve the appearance of cordiality and friendliness,
even when strong differences of opinion are present.
Nice words and polite smiles are expected as something
natural during everyday social interaction” (22).
According to Wierzbicka (23) the cultural norm of
friendliness encourages display of an attitude that can
be represented as follows “I feel something good toward
anyone”. It also encourages smiling to strangers, which
is not observed in Japan. Patterson et al. (24) analysed
behaviour of pedestrians in Japan and US and their
reactions toward stranger who either smiled or nodded
in their directions. Only 2 % of Japanese smiled back
whereas 25 % of Americans showed the same reaction.
American friendliness is often misinterpreted by
foreigners as a token of friendship. As Wanning (25,
p.139) observes: “There’s often a disappointment waiting
for the newcomer who takes American friendliness at
face value. Americans are indiscriminate with their
smiles and their chatter”.
Smile and maybe tomorrow,
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Piotr Szarota
Poland: The absent smile
As Wojciszke (26, p. 39) put it there are “cultures of
affirmation where you must be happy, or at least look
so”, “keep smiling cultures, where you need not be
happy, but you should not be unhappy”, and “cultures
of complaining where you must be unhappy, or at least
look so”. According to Wojciszke (26) a culture of
complaining thrives in Poland and the building blocks of
this culture include: the norm of negativity of one’s own
emotional states, the norm of negativity of the social
world, and the behavioral scripts of complaining.
The Polish norms of negativity have been analyzed by
Dolinski (27), who noted: “In Poland when asked ‘How
are you?’ someone who says that (s)he is doing fine is
perceived as boastful and conceited. In answer to such
a question it is considered polite to complain about
financial problems, bad luck, poor health or one’s boss”.
Dolinski (27) replicated B.W. Johnson’s (28) study in
which students assessed their moods for 65 consecutive
days by comparing them to their own typical moods.
While American students appeared to manifest a clear
positivity bias as they usually define their mood as better
than usual, Polish students who assessed their mood
for 100 consecutive days estimated it on the average as
“worse than usual”. To exclude the possibility that this
effect is exclusive to the specific sample of distressed
and overworked students, the study was later replicated
again, this time on the national representative sample;
the other Poles proved to be as immune towards
positivity bias as students (26).
According to Wierzbicka (29) one of the core values of
the Polish culture is szczeroϾ (roughly, sincerity). The
scripts of sincerity concern the value of presenting one’s
feelings ‘truthfully’, that is saying, and ‘showing’ what
one really feels. Wierzbicka (29) notes that the English
concept of frankness (as distinct from sincerity) has no
exact equivalent in Polish: “[frankness] acknowledges
the value of saying what one thinks in spite of the
fact that by doing so, one may cause someone to feel
something bad (a consequence that is seen as clearly
undesirable), and thus it celebrates two values at once:
saying what one thinks and paying attention to other
people’s feelings”. The Polish concept of szczeroœæ
celebrates only the value of saying what one thinks,
because - what Wierzbicka (29) also points out – in
Polish culture emotional spontaneity is valued more
highly than desire to make someone else feel good.
The Polish preoccupation with sincerity resulted in the
specific “smile codes”. Klos Sokol (30) – an American
linguist married to a Pole and living in Warsaw comments
that „Americans smile more in situations where Poles
tend not to”; Poles „don’t initiate an exchange of smiles
in a quick or anonymous interaction”. „In everyday
life, the approach to fleeting interactions in Poland is
often take-me-seriously. Rather than the cursory smile,
surface courtesy means a slight nod of the head. And
some Poles may not feel like masking their everyday
preoccupations. From this perspective, the smile would
be a fake”. As Wierzbicka (14, p. 244) puts it: “In Poland
the assumption that a person’s face should reflect his or
her feelings is far more than an individual preference: it
is a cultural premiss, supported by linguistic evidence in
the form of pejorative expressions like fa³szywy uœmiech
(a false smile) and sztuczny uœmiech (artificial smile)
[...]” Such expresions imply that „someone is displaying
good feelings towards another person that in fact are not
felt, and that of course it is very bad to do so”. It seems
then that the only valuable form of smile in Poland
would be the genuine Duchenne smile.
Smiling and happiness
The way a given culture constructs a social act of
smiling seems related to the cultural ideas of “happiness”.
A very concept of happiness has always been rather
vague and its definitions varied greatly starting from
pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, who maintained
that the happy life was enjoyable, not because of what
the happy person possessed, but because of the way the
happy person reacted to the life circumstances (31).
Today, because of the multiplicity of definitions and
meanings that happiness holds, researchers often avoid
the term (32). Those who still use it easily forget that
the concept of happiness is deeply embedded in culture.
American ethic of cheerfulness is closely connected
to the cultural preoccupation with happiness; so deep
that it has been reflected in American constitution. The
Declaration of Independence proclaims that the pursuit
of happiness is an inalienable right of every American
citizen. Thus happiness is construed as one of those
internal attributes that are to be pursued and attained
via personal striving. In other words, happiness is likely
to be constructed as personal achievement (cf. 33).
According to Suh (34) Americans invest a considerable
amount of effort to convince both themselves and others
that they are happy, and self-confident. As Kitayama nad
Markus (35, p. 141) put it, “Failing to be happy implies
that one is shirking one’s responsibility and failing to
realize the American cultural mandate”.
Small wonder, that most Americans when asked
describe themselves as happy. According to the World
Values Survey (36): 40.6 % of Americans, but only 10.3%
Poles, and 18% Japanese described themselves as “very
happy”; on the other hand only 10.3% Americans said
they are not happy in comparison to 17% Japanese, and
44.3% Poles. Commenting on those results Myers (37)
noted that people’s self-reports are susceptible to two
types of biases. One has to do with people’s temporary
moods, another with people’s tendency to “put on
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a good face” and “overreport good things”. But as we
already know Poles show completely different tendency,
they rather tend to overreport bad things. It makes those
results hardly comparable. As Wierzbicka (23, p.35) put
it: “Is it true that nations differ in happiness? Or do they
differ, rather, in what they are prepared to report about
the state of their happiness?”
We should also have serious doubts if the Americans,
Poles and Japanese understand happiness the same way.
Stanis³aw Baranczak, a Polish poet who lives in the US
comments on the differences between the English word
happy and its Polish equivalent “szczêœliwy”: “The Polish
word for ‘happy’ (and I believe this also holds for other
Slavic languages) has much more restricted meaning; it
is generally reserved for rare states of profound bliss, or
total satisfaction with serious things such as love, family,
the meaning of life, and so on. Accordingly it is not used
as often as ‘happy’ is in American common parlance”
(38, p. 12).
According to Wierzbicka (23) the English word “happy”
refers to the states within everyone’s reach. There is
nothing exceptional about “being happy” and in US it
is perceived as a relatively stable characteristic rather
than a momentary state of bliss. In their understanding
of happiness Japanese are much closer to Poles than
Americans. As it was noted recently by a Japanese
sociologist, Eisho Omura (39, p. 149): “Happiness is seen
as an ephemeral thing that slips out of your hand as soon
as you try to grasp it, just like a dream […] Unhappiness
is tinged with inevitability whereas happiness has a hint
of accidentalness […] the original spelling of one of the
Japanese words for happiness, shiawase, means a stroke
of fate or luck”.
Moreover happiness in Japan and other East Asian
cultures depends crucially on the realization of positive
social relationships. Personal happiness often damages
social relationship because emphasizing ones own success
may lead to jealousy and envy by others. As Uchida,
Norasakkunkit, and Kitayama (33, p. 226) put it: “The
personal form of happiness is therefore often perceived
to be tainted and incomplete, and as a consequence,
there is no strong desire to pursue personal happiness at
the expense of social harmony. Instead, happiness is seen
as an inter-subjective state that is grounded in mutual
sympathy, compassion, and support”.
Although the Japanese like Poles understand happiness
as something ephemeral and temporary they smile much
more. However it should be noted that the symbolical
connection between the smile and happiness which is
so well understood by Americans and Poles alike is not
that obvious in Japan. As I mentioned earlier, smiling
is rather associated with agreeableness and self-control
than with personal achievement (like in US) or genuine
positive emotions (like in Poland). Several studies have
shown that Americans and Japanese differ in perception
of facial expression of emotions, particularly the smiles.
Matsumoto (40), for instance demonstrated that the
Japanese were much more hesitant than Americans to
label smiling faces they saw on photographs as “happy”.
Conclusion
In this paper, I tried to show some substantial crosscultural variations in social construction of smiling and
happiness. In the recent studies Western ideas about
well-being have been typically contrasted with the
East-Asian cultural standards. I tried to emphasized
differences within so called Western culture pointing to
the American and Polish smiling codes and separate ways
of dealing with emotions. Future research should focus
on the question how different cultural construction of
happiness might affect people’s mental and physical
health. Some American authors, like Kramer (41) and
Held (21) have already pointed to the fact that the
pressure to be happy may contribute to some form of
unhappiness. As Catherine Lutz (42) put it: “What is
particularly deviant about the depressive is his failure
to engage in the pursuit of happiness or in the love of
self that is considered to be normal and basic goal of
persons”. Lutz’s (42) analysis was focused on “Western
conceptualization of depression” but in fact she pointed
to the typically American phenomenon.
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