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Duchenne Smile

According to Wikipedia:

A Duchenne smile contracts the zygomatic muscles of the cheek and eye, forming crow’s feet. The crow’s feet indicate that the smile is genuine and that the smiler is truly happy. It was discovered by and is named after Guillaume Duchenne.

After writing about prosody I spent an hour or so running around esciencenews.com. There’s some great articles and tons of science. From a writing standpoints one article stuck out in particular. Smiles!

Skin bunched by the eyes, raised cheekbones, a slight squint, all signs of a genuine smile…and useful to write when you’re sick of ‘John Smiled’

If facial expressions say more than a 1000 words, than we can cut out a thousand words by writing about facial expressions, yes? Maybe not, but prosody…what a great word! Sometimes you read something and it just overflows with…well…prosody. Tapping into little things like facial expressions is a good way to furfill that arch-commandment of show, not tell.

Here’s another article explaining just how people respond to these little facial queues.