Mona Lisa’s smile decoded: science says she’s happy

THE SUBJECT of centuries of scrutiny and debate, Mona Lisa’s famous smile is routinely described as ambiguous. But is it really that hard to read? Apparently not. In an unusual trial, close to 100 per cent of people described her expression as unequivocally “happy”, researchers revealed Friday. “We really were astonished,” neuroscientist Juergen Kornmeier of the University of Freiburg in Germany, who coauthored the study, told AFP.

Kornmeier and a team used what is arguably the most famous artwork in the world in a study of factors that influence how humans judge visual cues such as facial expressions.

Known as La Gioconda in Italian, the Mona Lisa is often held up as a symbol of emotional enigma. The portrait appears to manytobesmilingsweetlyatfirst, only to adopt a mocking sneer or sad stare the longer you look.

Using a black and white copy, a team manipulated the model’s mouth corners slightly up and down to create eight altered images — four marginally “happier”, and four “sadder” Mona Lisas.

A block of nine images were shown to 12 trial participants 30 times. In every showing participants had to describe each of the nine images as happy or sad.

“We thought that the original would be the most ambiguous,” Kornmeier said. Instead, “to our great astonishment, we found that Da Vinci’s original was... perceived as happy” in 97 per cent of cases.

97% of people said they saw her smile as ‘happy’