In a recent blog post on Psychology Today, Dr. Noam Spencer, a professor of psychology at Otterbein College wrote about “The Hidden Cost of Smiling.” He talks about Americans and how they are “over-socialized to smile, and argues that Americans are taught to smile at all situations, to the point where it has become an empty expression”.
Dr. Spencer relates the tendency to deliver an empty smile so easily, and in so many situations, to that of a psychopath, and that we as a society encourage and tolerate the “dissociation of facial expressions from their original purpose of communicating an underlying truth”.