Culture shapes how leaders smile, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologist Jeanne Tsai found that the more a particular country's culture values excitement, the more its political leaders show enthusiastic smiles. On the other hand, when the specific culture emphasizes calm, those leaders show more reserved smiles. By Clifton B. Parker How much a political leader smiles reflects their particular country's cultural values related to how people express themselves, a Stanford scholar has found. How a political leader smiles in official photos - left, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe; right, U.S. President Barack Obama - reflects their particular country's cultural values related to how people express themselves, a Stanford scholar has found. In the United States, the smiles of politicians and other leaders tend to be big and wide. In East Asian countries like China and Taiwan, they are much more modest, the research showed. The reason is that how one's culture views smiling influences how people in that culture may smile, said Jeanne Tsai , a Stanford associate professor of psychology and the lead author on a recently published paper in the journal Emotion.