The Opportunity Game

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

Each time that I watch this video, I feel my deep ambivalence about making intimate connections with strangers. Intellectually, it feels like a wonderful idea. However, when I’m walking outside and someone I don’t know nears me, it takes all of my courage to look them directly in the eye and smile at them. My fear of rejection is so great that I don’t want to risk even a moment of rejection for the possibility of connection. And yet I do. Most times, the other people happily return my smile. They have no idea how much I felt I just risked in offering a simple smile.

And what is a “simple smile”? It turns out that there are several different types of smiles. A “Duchenne smile” (named after the French doctor Guillaume Duchenne who studied facial expressions) is considered to be an authentic smile as it involves the contractions of both the voluntary muscles around the mouth and the involuntary muscles on the sides of our eyes. This signals a rush of genuine spontaneous positive feeling on the part of the person smiling.  A “non Duchenne smile” involves only the voluntary contraction of our mouth muscles and thus can be perceived to be a more superficial or manipulative expression. Read the rest of this entry »

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