Doesn’t the frequency of smiling really vary by culture anyway? I remember when I moved to Germany in the 1980s that some of my peers there made good-natured fun of Americans for smiling too much. I remember a German friend of mine telling me he couldn’t believe we were so happy all the time. Couldn’t we try more varied expressions?

It’s not that my German friends did not smile, of course they did and often. It’s just that the circumstances weren’t always the same as for Americans.

When I was a child and we moved from Ohio to Alabama, I actually found myself in slightly opposite shoes. To my Yankee eyes, Southerners seemed to smile too often and in the “wrong” contexts. I wasn’t accustomed to strangers waving and smiling at me and it took me a little while to get used to it and not suppose they knew me and wanted something.

It’s really interesting how facial expressions vary across cultures, and I think it’s natural to presume they’ve varied a bit over time as well.