George W.'s Smirk: A Chatterbox Investigation
George W. Bush's smirk has become a hot political story. On C-Span, Bill
Kristol revealed that Bush's "funny little grin, almost a smirk, that comes
across his face occasionally at inappropriate times" had occasioned perplexed
discussion among staffers at the cutting-edge-conservative Weekly
Standard , which Kristol edits. Brian Williams and the Boston Globe 's
David Nyhan also noted the Smirk Problem on MSNBC and CNN, respectively,
prompting a superbly detailed Dec. 3 article by the Wall Street
Journal 's Jackie Calmes. Calmes described the following eerie scene:
At a campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa, Mr. Bush toured a Christian
pregnancy-counseling center to promote his antiabortion views and support for
faith-based social services. As he sat at a table with two female workers
there, he continuously wore a sort of smile as he listened to each woman. One
of the women, a counselor for "post-abortion trauma," told how she had become
pregnant at 20, helplessly felt she had no alternative but abortion, "and for
15 years ... suffered in silence." Still, the right side of Mr. Bush's mouth
seemed frozen in a half smile.
The smirk resurfaced at last week's New Hampshire debate, according to
The New Yorker 's Joe Klein, who in the Dec. 13 issue writes that
Bush
will squinny his eyes, raise his chin, lift an eyebrow, and curl his lip
slightly--his face seems to be involved in a somewhat painful,
quasi-involuntary struggle to prevent itself from erupting into a broad,
self-satisfied smile. This facial skirmish is often accompanied by a slight
forward bend at the waist and a what-me-worry? shrug, and they often occur
after the Governor has delivered a line particularly well, or thinks he
has.
The smirk is causing much justifiable worry in Republican circles. "I hear
some saying that his friendly outgoing personality on TV is mistaken for a
smirk and smugness," a "senior Republican official" was quoted as saying in the
Dec. 8 Boston Globe . "A few have said to me, 'He has to
make sure that charm is not mistaken for arrogance.'" Presumably Bush himself
got the message; his smirk was not much in evidence at this week's Arizona
debate. (Click here to see for yourself.)
Clearly, though, the smirk will return, and when it does, political
spinmeisters will try to define it away as an "image problem," a mere matter of
faulty subjective analysis by pundits and voters. A far more interesting
question than how Bush's smirk is interpreted , however, is: What does it
mean ? Calmes quotes C-Span's Brian Lamb as saying, in effect, that it's
just a cruel trick of genetic physiognomy: "His father has the same thing; it's
just not as pronounced as it is with 'W.'" But since personality is also
to some extent genetically based and, moreover, can be passed environmentally
from one generation to the next--particularly when father and son share not
only the same home but also a few institutional influences (e.g.,
Andover and Yale)--it is conceivable that the shared smirk signifies a
shared ... arrogance.
Klein, quite rightly, warns us not to be too hasty in reaching this
conclusion:
It would be easy to mistake such elaborate body language for arrogance,
as more than a few observers have, whereas the true meaning of the tic may be
the exact opposite. It may just signify relief--that he has successfully
managed to jump another public hurdle without embarrassing himself. Or it may
mean nothing at all.
Concluding that the matter of Bush's smirk was too weighty to be left in the
hands of nonscientists, Chatterbox e-mailed Paul Ekman,
professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco.
According to the Orlando Sentinel Tribune , Ekman is the nation's
"leading smile researcher." His academic writings on how to interpret facial
expressions have been used by lawyers to figure out which potential jurors to
eject during voir dire and by gamblers to figure out the giveaway signs
of a card player's bluff. If anyone could explain the meaning of George W.'s
troubling smirk, it was Ekman. But Ekman made clear in a response to
Chatterbox's note that he wouldn't play:
I watch George W. and have many thoughts about it. But I have a policy
about never talking about anyone who is in office or running for office, or is
in litigation. So I can't help you. I don't know anyone responsible and
knowledgeable who can.
Undaunted, Chatterbox marched off to a nearby bookstore and purchased
What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of
Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) ,
edited by Ekman and Erika Rosenberg. He then burrowed in for a long read.
Chatterbox learned that the science of studying facial expressions is
relatively new: Before the 1960s, apparently, "it was deemed a useless
enterprise." This consensus changed as a result of work done by Silvan Tomkins,
Ekman, and a few others. In 1971, for example, Ekman and W.V. Friesen examined
the facial expressions of Japanese and American students as they watched
"stressful films." When they watched these films alone, the Japanese and the
Americans had similar, distressed expressions on their faces. When they watched
these films in the presence of an "authority figure," however, the Americans'
facial expressions were essentially the same as when they watched the films
alone, whereas the Japanese "showed much less negative affect, smiled
sometimes, and actually masked negative emotion with smiling behavior."
Conclusion: Americans are less guarded in letting facial expressions show what
they're feeling. A reassuring finding in light of the question before us.
During the 1970s, Ekman developed a method called the Facial Action
Coding System (FACS) to measure "all visually discernible facial movement."
The building blocks of FACS are 46 "action units " (AUs) such as a
wrinkling of the nose, a puffing of the cheeks, dilation of the nostrils,
squinting, and so on. These AUs, usually identified by the facial muscles that
perform these various tasks, are the tools used in What the Face
Reveals . (To look at a few examples, click here and
here.)
Sadly, there is no chapter on smirking per se in Ekman and
Rosenberg's book. (In a 1992 report to the National Science Foundation, Ekman and several
co-authors reject the term "smirk" on the grounds that it's too coarse and
imprecise, "ignoring differences between a variety of different muscular
actions to which [it] may refer, and mixing description with inferences about
meaning or the message which [it] may convey.") But there are three
chapters in the book that may nonetheless be relevant to the smirking
question:
Let's start with a chapter (by Ekman and Joseph G. Hager) titled "The
Asymmetry of Facial Actions." George W.'s smirk is asymmetrical, is it not? The
chapter describes an experiment in which 33 right-handed Caucasian women ages
18 to 53 were exposed to various mildly unpleasant experiences and asked to
smile. Then they were asked, "Now that this is done, aren't you glad it's
over?" This inspired spontaneous smiles. Ekman and Hager found that the
smiles-on-demand were less symmetrical than the spontaneous smiles. This might
mean George W.'s apparent smirk is merely a forced smile, not a smug or
mean or even dishonest one.
Another interpretation is suggested in a chapter (by Ekman and several
others) titled "Type A Behavior Pattern." Here, the authors argue that the
group of people most likely to suffer heart attacks are more apt than others to
glare and show facial signs of disgust. George W. doesn't glare much, as far as
Chatterbox can tell, but his smirk may be an expression of disgust. If
that's true, he would seem to face a heightened risk of heart disease.
The most provocative chapter in the book (by Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and
Maureen O'Sullivan) is titled "Smiles When Lying." According to Ekman, Friesen,
and O'Sullivan, there is a clear distinction between "felt happy" smiles and
"masking" smiles intended to hide some other emotion. (The subject doesn't
actually have to be telling a lie; rather, the facial expression
itself is the lie.) Felt happy smiles "are defined as the action
of the zygomatic major [lip] and orbicularis oculi, pars
lateralis [eye] muscles." Masking smiles use a whole bunch of other
facial muscles associated with fear, disgust, contempt, sadness, and anger. One
such muscle is the triangularis , which (judging from an illustrative
photograph on Page 208) pulls the corner of the lip down in an
expression that Chatterbox would call ... a smirk.
Chatterbox will refrain from endorsing any of these three
hypotheses-- forced smile , susceptibility to heart attack ,
falsity --to explain George W.'s smirk. Rather, he calls on Ekman or some
other expert to tell us which, if any, is correct.
