Tony Blair's smile

[Andy008]

Is it just me who thinks his smile is really scary? Sort of like Jack Nicholson in the Shining, but worse.

[woofgang]

no, its me too!

[Zen]

I remember when he was elected first time round an old bloke in the pub said to me,never trust a man with a permanent smirk on his face,how true.

[tetherend]

You're right, it's a strange, insincere movement of the mouth rather than a smile.

[Dom Tuk]

No i dont think the smile is scary. I just think it is well perfected. It is designed to appear sincere and to me it does appear as if the smile was intended and not fake. But i will not vote for him even if he does not hang upside down in a dark cave.

[tartanwiz]

Indeed it is like the smile of the crocodile. In the words of the song Never smile at a crocodile, 'don't be taken in by his welcome grin'.

[Golem]

The comments that specifically describe Blair's smile are interesting, with some suggesting that it is insincere. If the two extremes are that his smile is 'always fake' or 'always genuine' it's likely that in reality he must fall somewhere in between. I think part of the problem is his overuse of the smile, that he uses it in situations where we would not expect a person to be smiling. This then influences our interpretation of whether any given smile is genuine or not. Researchers have found that we already over estimate our own ability to distinguish a fake smile from a genuine one, probably since Desmond Morris' Manwatching made us all amateur anthropologists, and with Blair's over exposure it's easy to become suspicious of him. Psychologists have devised a method of sorting the fakes from the real with a system called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).

You'll find a report here about research from the University of Hertfordshire that investigated men and women's ability to spot fake smiles, along with a link to a self test of twenty smiles that you have to assess.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4436021.stm

Some of them are even scarier than Blair!