(Credit: mimagephotography/shutterstock) Seeing a smile can make a person unconsciously smile in return, and now scientists find that digitally mimicking the voice of a smiling person can also make people reflexively smile. Charles Darwin and his contemporaries were among the first scientists to investigate smiles. Darwin suggested that smiles and several other facial expressions are universal to all humans, rather than unique products of a person's culture. "There is evidence that smiles are a profoundly deep gesture in the human repertoire," agrees study lead author Pablo Arias, an audio engineer and cognitive scientist at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in Paris. "Smiles are recognized across cultures, and babies a few weeks old already produce smiles long before they know how to talk."
Previous research noted that smiles not only trigger visible changes to a person’s face, but also audible changes to the human voice. "(It’s) what I ...
