微笑是人际沟通的重要一环：不会笑怎么办

Kevin Portillo practises smiling every day at home. Usually after brushing his teeth. Or when stopping by the bathroom, or anywhere with a mirror.

凯文.波蒂洛（Kevin Portillo）每天在家练习微笑。通常是在他刷完牙之后，或是经过卫生间的时候，抑或是任何有镜子的地方。

He hooks an index finger into each side of his mouth and pulls gently upward. He puckers his face into a kiss, then opens wide into an O, trying to limber up his facial muscles. He practises both the Mona Lisa – slight, closed-lip – and a wide, toothy smile.

他用食指钩起嘴角两边，轻轻向上拉。他撅起双唇，呈亲吻状，然后张开成O型，尽量让面部肌肉活跃起来。他既练习蒙娜丽莎式的微笑——嘴唇闭合，微露笑意；也练习咧嘴的、露齿的笑脸。

At least, he’s supposed to do his exercises every day. Being 13, he sometimes forgets, though he understands their importance.

最起码，他每天都要锻炼。13岁的他有时候会忘记，但他明白练习的重要性。

“I need to stretch my cheeks,” he says. “I do it for a couple minutes. I have to do it every single day.” He exercises so much that his jaw sometimes hurts.

我需要脸部拉伸，他说。"我一次会做两三分钟。每天都要做。"他练习过于频繁，导致下颌有时候会痛。

Kevin was born in New Jersey with a rare malignant vascular tumour, a kaposiform haemangioendothelioma, covering the left side of his face, squeezing shut his left eye and pushing his nose to the right. Immediately after his birth, doctors whisked him away to another hospital in another state – the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His mother didn’t see him again until he was eight days old.

凯文出生于新泽西州，患有一种罕见的恶性血管肿瘤，卡波西型血管内皮瘤，影响脸的左半边，使得左眼紧闭，挤得鼻子偏向右边。他刚一出生，医生就急忙带他到另一个州的医院去——费城儿童医院。直到他出生后第八天，他的母亲才再次见到他。

The doctor told Kevin’s parents that the chance of him surviving was slim.

医生告诉凯文的父母，他活下去的希望很渺茫。

But survive he did. However, the large tumour and the damage from its treatment prevented him from being able to do one of the most fundamental things humans do.

但是他挺过来了。然而，大的肿块和治疗带来的损伤让他无法做到人类最重要的事情之一：微笑。

On a physical level, a smile is clear enough. There are 17 pairs of muscles controlling expression in the human face, plus a singular muscle, the orbicularis oris, that runs in a ring around the mouth.

在生理层面，微笑呈现的形式十分清楚。有17对肌肉控制着人脸的表情，加上一块单独的肌肉，口轮匝肌，是口唇内的环形肌。

The basic upward curving smile is achieved primarily by two pairs of muscles known as the zygomaticus major and minor. These connect the corners of the mouth to the temples, tugging lips upward – often accompanied, depending on the underlying emotions and thoughts, by the levator labii superioris, raising the upper lip, and other muscles of the face.

基本的嘴角上扬式的微笑主要由两对肌肉来实现，称为颧大肌和颧小肌。这两对肌肉连接口角和太阳穴，向上抻拉嘴唇,通常彼此伴随进行，由潜在的感情和思绪而定，这个动作常常伴有上唇提肌，使嘴唇和脸部其它肌肉上扬。

It is when we leave the realm of physiognomy, however, that the smile becomes enigmatic. This contraction of various facial muscles resonates across the entire arc of human history, from the grinning Greek kouros sculptures of 2,500 years ago right up to emoji, those little images that pepper our online communications.

然而，正是当我们离开容貌的范围，微笑才变得像谜一样。这种多处面部肌肉的收缩在整个人类历史上产生共鸣，从2500年前咧嘴笑的希腊青年雕像，一直到表情符号emoji，这些小图像在我们网上聊天中纷至沓来。

There are differences in gender (generally, women smile more) and culture. Smiles are definitely communicative – people smile more when in public than they do when alone, and more when interacting with others than when not.

表情符号在性别（一般来说，女性微笑更频繁）和文化中存在差异。笑脸肯定能交流思想，人们在公共场合比独处时更容易微笑，在同他人交往中也更容易微笑。

Scientists have shown that smiles are far easier to recognise than other expressions. What they don’t know is why.

科学家表明，笑容比其它表情更容易识别。他们不清楚个中原因。

We can do really well recognising smiles,” says Aleix Martinez, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University and founder of its Computational Biology and Cognitive Science Lab.

俄亥俄州立大学电子与计算机工程学教授马丁内斯（Aleix Martinez）说，"我们在识别笑容方面的表现很出色。"他还是学校计算机生物与认知科学实验室的创始人。

“Why is that true? Nobody can answer that right now. We don’t know. I can show you an image for just 10 milliseconds and you can tell me it’s a smile. It does not work with any other expression.”

为什么会这样？目前没有人能回答。只给你10毫秒的时间看一幅图，你就会告诉我那是微笑。没有其它表情会产生这样的效果。

Bafflingly, fear takes an exposure time of 250 milliseconds to recognise – 25 times as long as a smile. “Recognising fear is fundamental to survival, while a smile…” muses Martinez. “But that’s how we are wired.”

令人费解的是，恐惧的表情要花费250毫秒的时间才能识别出来，是识别微笑所需时间的25倍。“识别恐惧对于生存来说很重要，而微笑呢……”马尔内斯边思考边说。“但那是我们紧张起来的过程。“

Other studies have shown that smiling faces are also judged as more familiar than neutral ones. Scientists such as Martinez theorise that smiles – as well as frowns and other facial expressions – are remnants of humanity’s distant pre-linguistic heritage. Human language started developing as far back as 100,000 years ago, but our facial expressions reach back further still, perhaps as far as some of our earliest human ancestors.

其它研究表明，人们认为微笑的脸庞比不露声色的表情更熟悉。像马尔内斯的科学家们从理论上说明，微笑同皱眉和其它面部表情一样，是人类久远的遗产，早在语言出现之前就已经存在。人类语言开始形成可追溯到100,000年前，但我们的面部表情可延伸到更早的时候，可能和一些最初的人类祖先一样早。

“Before we could communicate verbally, we had to communicate with our faces,” Martinez says.

马丁内斯说，"在用语言交流之前，人类必须用表情交流。"