Washington (dpa) @ If you seek to establish contact with other people by smiling, you will have luck only with sociable people. Their brain responds to the happy expression and reacts with positive emotions, U.S. researchers say.
On the other hand, the same smile has no effect on grouches. Introverts or neurotics feel little or nothing at all when they see a happy face. Their brain remains impassive.
The researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, discovered this from photographs of the brain made with functional magnetic resonance tomography. They presented participants in their experiments with photographs of both happy and angry faces and measured their brain stimulation.
Writing in the magazine Science, researcher Turhan Canli and his team say that the processing of a cheerful vision in the amygdala, the region of the brain responsible for emotions, depends on the open-mindedness of a person. The more extroverted he is, the more likely he is to allow himself to be infected by cheerfulness.
On the other hand, the reaction to a threatening expression is independent of the level of introversion or extroversion. A threatening expression provokes a grim face right down the line. Canli and his colleagues see this as the brain's natural reaction to a possible threat which is shown on the face.
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