Hidden smiles
In masked society, we need substitute for our best form of nonverbal communication
The strangeness first hit Jacqueline Colavolpe in late April, on the day her fiance was finally tested for COVID19 after three weeks of being sick.
He had started developing symptoms just after Colavolpe, 33, recovered from her battle with the virus. As they pulled into the drivethrough clinic, Colavolpe, a freelance producer who lives in San Francisco, felt overcome with emotion as she made eye contact with one of the nurses who had been so kind to her fiance amid all the panic.
Without thinking, Colavolpe smiled at her through the window, but was confused when the nurse didn’t react. Then Colavolpe remembered she was wearing her mask, and burst into tears. “I just wanted her to see it,” Colavolpe said. “It wasn’t even a ‘thank you,’ necessarily, but more like, ‘I see you out here, I see the work you’re doing. I know it’s not easy.’ ”
Already, the pandemic has shifted the way we physically embrace — gone are the days of friendly handshakes or passing hugs — but as the Bay Area prepares for the possibility that masks might be in our longterm future, many are wondering how human interaction and understanding might transform in the absence of our most nuanced and
essential form of nonverbal communication: the smile.
The smile is perhaps the most kaleidoscopic tool of facial expression. In just an instant, the muscle contraction can communicate everything from arousal to approval and embarrassment to a multitude of other feelings at once. Obscuring our most universal facial expression poses an interesting question for emotion researchers, who are thinking about the cultural costs of this new chapter in human interaction, particularly at a time when isolation and disconnection are already at highs.
The cost could be particularly high for Americans because of the value we put on smiles, said Jeanne Tsai, professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Emotion Laboratory at Stanford University. Crossculturally, the face is critical to how we express and read other people’s emotions, but the driving focus of the face varies by cultural group. In the U.S., people put a lot of social and material stock in the mouth’s role in a smile — it’s the signifier they use to determine friend from foe, and can influence their perceptions even more potently than features related to race or gender, Tsai said.
“In American culture, your feelings are so much a part of who you are and we express these emotions on the face,” Tsai said. “So to hide the face and particularly the smile, in some ways, it’s hiding people’s identities, and that’s why it’s particularly hard in American contexts to do that.”
There’s also the economic piece: In her team’s study of the international microlending platform, Kiva, the research found that Americans were more likely to lend money to people with bigger smiles. During a pandemic that obscures the mouth with face coverings, Tsai says, when sharing resources is critical, the findings might be cause for concern.
One thing is becoming clear: Communication in an allmasked society means people will have to rely more on the explicit when interacting outside of their direct pods. As we ease into a paradigm shift for the way we make nonverbal connections with people, there will likely be misfirings and confusion, but also, perhaps, some room for experimentation.
Over the years, Amanda Guest, 43, has gotten acquainted with her mail carrier in the Castro district, and she’s started thinking about how the loss of smiling must affect him, as he encounters so many people and scenes in all the hours of his day. Recently, he pasted a felt smile to the outside of his mask, and it moved her.
“I saw that and I immediately smiled,” said Guest, who runs the community radio station BFF.fm. “I called out and said, ‘I love your smile,’ and he said, ‘It makes me happy that it makes you happy.’ ”
It struck her to think about what it must have meant for him to have lost — at least temporarily — access to his smile, and everyone else’s.
“In these times, we need a hand sign that says, ‘I’m smiling,’ ” said Jenn Melzer, a packaging designer who splits her time between Grass Valley (Nevada County) and Oakland. After an awkward encounter with someone at a store, Melzer has found herself wondering what the “new smile” could be. A wave? A peace sign? A hang10 gesture with the hands? A wink? The tip of the mask? The smize?
The jury is out for whether the magic of emotion can truly be communicated with just the smize — the term for “smiling” with one’s eyes — but the fact of it, according to Erika Rosenberg, a noted facial scientist who has studied facial expression for more than 30 years, is that eyes give us only partial emotional information, at best. These days, Rosenberg has been trying to nod and wave to people when she’s masked and walking out on the street near her house in Oakland, but it’s not exactly the same.
Some of her friends say they’ve noticed themselves smiling less frequently, in the absence of social feedback. “They don’t know what to do,” Rosenberg said. “They don’t know if they want to be overt as waving because that takes a certain extroversion. It’s an interesting empirical question: to see if people smile less because it’s not received.”
If maskwearing becomes a longterm reality, Rosenberg thinks the best option is redesigning masks, or adopting the transparent ones that have already been circulating in smaller markets. New gestures could also develop, she says, but it’s hard to know what exactly could — or would — come close to the smile.
Otherwise, she says, that kind of American social smile — the one we do in passing to strangers — could drop off from our nonverbal repertoire.
For some people, the potential for that shift has some elements of relief. For Fabo JaNecko, the degree of social privacy behind the mask has been a welcome transition for other reasons.
“As an autistic person, it’s great not to have the pressure to smile and interact with people when I pass them,” said JaNecko, 21, who lives in Oakland and works at a program for adults with developmental disabilities. “Usually in public I ‘mask’ so neurotypicals think I’m normal — but now the rest of the world has to literally mask.”
At a time with as much disquiet and tension in the air as the current moment, it can also feel like there are more confounding barriers to smiles than just the physical ones. To be outside is now laden with multiple and conflicting demands: the demand of being safe from a virus that spreads through human contact, but also the desire to be social. It’s a complicated dance of opposing forces, where we’re all somehow teammates and opponents at the same time.
“It feels foreign and impersonal — like the environment or you are deemed unsafe to your neighbors and your peers,” said comedy producer Marc Atkinson. As a naturally upbeat person, he’s tried to compensate in the ways he knows how — by laughing more, trying to tell more jokes, even smizing. But he recently had an experience that made it even more apparent to him that, in these times, optimistic blinders are all we have.
He had gone down to a bakery near his house in the Sunset District of San Francisco for a breakfast sandwich, and ended up chatting with the cashier. When it came time to order, he kind of “danced” his order, with elaborate flourishes of his arm as he pointed to different pastries in the glass case. “I was being a little bit of a ham,” Atkinson said. The cashier told him how much she appreciated his mood and said she could just feel it even through his mask. It had brightened her morning, she told him, because most of the time, she notices a kind of unbreakable tension in the air.
“It was this dose of realism in the morning — it helped me put together that there’s a lot of value of still engaging and showing people that happiness, even if it’s hard for you,” Atkinson, 29, said. “While we know that we need to do this for the greater good, I think it’s OK to acknowledge that there is a social void, but I think it takes important action on our parts not to let that social void creep outwards.”
“To hide the face and particularly the smile, in some ways, it’s hiding people’s identities.”
Jeanne Tsai, director of the Culture and Emotion Laboratory at Stanford