BLOG: Visible Teeth Are Key to a Face Standing Out in a Crowd

The weekly Mensa newsletter that my husband, Bill Koelzer, gets frequently contains articles that can be useful to us in our everyday lives. Here's an example:

So you're in a college or business lecture and the speaker asks a question and YOU know the answer, and it is a perfect answer because you have studied and studied to death that particular arcane topic.

You definately want the speaker to call on YOU because you feel that your answer will best serve the rest of the audience and most likely make brownie points for you with the speaker.

He is looking out over the crowd punctuated with lots of other raised hands. So what can you do to increase the odds of him calling on you?

You can S-M-I-L-E and show lots of teeth.

Smile BIG, like a big, teethy cheshire cat!

That might just do it. Here's why, according to the experts:

"The research concerned with the face-in-the-crowd effect essentially deals with the question of how we detect social signals of friendly or unfriendly intent in the human face," said author Gernot Horstmann, PhD, of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Department of Psychology at Bielefeld University, Germany.

"Our results indicate that contrary to previous assertions, detection of smiles or frowns is relatively slow in crowds of neutral faces, whereas toothy grins and snarls are quite easily detected."

In two studies, the researchers asked subjects to search for a happy or an angry face within a crowd of neutral faces, then measured the search speed.

While the search was relatively slow when emotion was signaled with a closed-mouth face, the speed search doubled when emotion was signaled with an open mouth and visible teeth. This was the case for both happy and angry faces, and happy faces were found even somewhat faster than angry faces.

Horstmann and his colleagues conducted these experiments as a result of discrepancies in previous studies that investigated visual search for emotional faces.

According to the research team, the inconsistent results with respect to which of the two expressions are found faster — the happy face or the angry face — suggested that the emotional expression category could not be the only important factor determining the face-in-the-crowd effect.

The scientists believe this new study may explain the discrepancies. "This will probably inspire researchers to clarify whether emotion and, in particular, threat plays an additional, unique role in face detection," said Horstmann.

So I guess our parents were right to tell us to wipe away our deadpan faces and walk around instead with a big smile .

Elements of the above story are reprinted from materials provided by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO).