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The Atlantic reports on why we tend to cry on planes.  You’re usually alone, secluded from the rest of the world, no contact with anyone (no email or phone). Why not have a good cry?

According to this article, 41% of men stated that they had “buried themselves in blankets to hide tears in their eyes from other passengers.”

According to Elijah Wolfson, there’s no scientific research on the phenomenon of crying on planes, but it’s become quite clear that this experience isn’t limited to his small social group.  In researching the subject, he’s heard from mothers, young couples, sturdy middle-aged men, grandmothers, irony-obsessed millennials, and more; a 2011 segment on This American Life showcased writer Brett Martin’s tearful breakdown on a plane during the end of the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Sweet Home Alabama.

In 2011, Virgin Atlantic ran a survey asking customers to describe their on-flight emotional experiences. Overall, 55% of travelers said they had “experienced heightened emotions while flying,” and as the stunning statisitc previously mentioned, 41 % have also shed some in flight tears.

There are many theories about why humans cry, ranging from the biophysical to the evolutionary. One of the most compelling hypotheses is Jeffrey Kottler’s, discussed at length in his 1996 book The Language of Tears. Kottler believes that humans cry because, unlike every other animal, we take years and years to be able to fend for ourselves. Until that time, we need a behavior that can elicit the sympathetic consideration of our needs from those around us who are more capable (adults). We can’t just yell for help though—that would alert predators to helpless prey—so instead, we’ve developed a silent scream: we tear up.

“It’s the biological equipment used by infants to maintain proximity to their caregivers,” explains Ad Vingerhoets, professor of social and behavioral sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and one of the world’s leading experts in crying.

In adults, the issue becomes a bit more complicated. In a study published in 2000, Vingerhoets and a team of researchers found that adults, unlike children, rarely cry in public.  They wait until they’re in the privacy of their homes—when they are alone or, at most, in the company of one other adult. On the face of it, the “crying-as-communication” hypothesis does not fully hold up, and it certainly doesn’t explain why we cry when we’re alone, or in an airplane surrounded by strangers we have no connection to.

While there have not been any peer-reviewed studies of crying on airplanes up to this point, there was study published in 2004 that considered grieving while driving, and in it, researchers found that grievers often “hold off grieving until they are alone and behind the wheel. They are free then from the distractions…this time by themselves provides them with the freedom for emotional processing and relief.”

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Fars News.com reports on the influence a smile can have on the observer’s perception of that person’s state of mind.  People deduce other’s states of mind greatly from the facial expressions they employ.

One of the longest standing questionable smiles is Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa.  Is she happy, is she sad, what lies behind her smile?

Spanish researchers found out how much Mona Lisa’s smile truly confuses our emotion recognition and has most of us perceiving a face as happy even if it’s not.

The question being asked is, Is the Human Brain Capable of Identifying a Fake Smile?

David Beltrán Guerrero, researcher at the University of La Laguna explains,  “The smile plays a key role in recognizing others´ happiness. But, as we know, we are not really happy every time we smile.  In some cases, a smile merely expresses politeness or affiliation.  In others, it may even be a way of hiding negative feelings and incentives, such as dominance, sarcasm, nervousness or embarrassment.“

The authors of the study, employed faces with both smiling mouths and eyes expressing non-happiness emotions and faces in both eyes and mouth express the same emotional state.

According the the article, the objective was to discover how fare the smile skews the recognition of ambiguous expressions making the observer identify those faces with happiness even though they are accompanied by eyes that express a different feeling.

The researchers found that when the task is purely perceptive — like the detection of facial features — the smile has a very strong influence, to the extent that differences between ambiguous expressions (happy mouth and non-happy eyes) and genuinely happy expressions (happy mouth and eyes) are not distinguished.  However, when the task involved categorizing expressions, that is recognizing if they are happy, sad or any other emotion, the influence of the smile weakens.

However, the influence of the smile disappears in emotional assessment (when someone is asked to assess whether a facial expression is positive or negative),  “A smile can cause us to interpret a non-happy expression as happy, except when we are involved in the emotional assessment of said expression,“ Beltran highlights.

The reason for these discrepancies…A smile sometimes leading to the incorrect categorization of an expression is related to its high visual “salience” (its attention-grabbing capacity) and its almost exclusive association with the emotional state of happiness.

Test your ability to distinguish between genuine and social smiles: take our smile quiz!