A study of impression differences between smile performers and observers-toward the Significance of Smile Training

Facial expressions play important roles in face-to-face communication. Smiles, especially, are frequently displayed and seen and generally provide a positive impression. Recently, various methods of training to improve the physical form of the smile have been proposed and applied by some businesses and organizations. However, previous methods have not considered how observers feel about trained smiles, although these observers are among those responding to trained smiles. In this study, differences in impressions of three smile patterns that differ in duration (fast: 275 ms, normal: 550 ms, slow: 1100 ms) between smilers and observers were analyzed with Target Smile Expression Support (TS-ES). Data obtained by the semantic differential method were analyzed. TS-ES has been proposed as an objective method for describing quantitative aspects of smiles. Our results reveal a tendency for smilers to have relatively more positive impressions to smiles expressed in 550 ms, whereas untrained observers have relatively more positive impressions of smiles expressed in 275 ms.