Cultural Smiles

Was mining James "Dinotopia" Gurney's blog (he has a lot of great technical art posts in there) and came across this interesting post about the difference between Amercan & British smiles. That linked over to an article in the NY times about professor Dacher Keltner who was doing research on it. There wasn't proof but the idea being tested is that American's smile like Tom Cruise, upper teeth only, and British smile like Prince Charles, pulling back the lower lips to show bottom teeth also.  This stuff is so interesting to me, and seems very applicable to animators, but unfortunately not easy to dabble in. (I do recommend Paul Ekman's books, personally I wasn't too into Desmond Morris')


Anyone else want to chime in with cultural differences in non verbal communication? This blog gets visitors from Iceland, Brazil, Canadian's, all over Europe, India,Iran, Thailand, Japan, and Australia. What have you guys noticed watching Hollywood movies that seems slightly odd from your cultural perspective?

*this book I read said that the smile only has 1 muscle involved that pulls the lips up and back, exposing only the upper teeth, the author said that if you see lower teeth it's because the person is trying to smile bigger so involving mouth widening muscles that don't actually come into use in the natural smile. 11/14/2010