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Real smiles and false smilesWhen you smile a real smile, two things happen to your face: your lips move up towards your cheeks, and your cheeks themselves go up and gather in the skin around the eyes. And a real smile will usually only last for up to four seconds. False smiles are seen on the faces of politicians or people who are pretending they are pleased to see you. False smiles usually appear a bit too early or too late, and they tend to last for too long. But if you really want to know if a smile is real or false, look at the eyes. In a false smile they don’t change. Eyes are important in other ways, too. When you feel good, your pupils get larger; when you feel bad, they become small. Laughter: the best medicine In 1964 an American journalist called Norman Cousins developed a serious problem with his back. It turned out that he had a dangerous illness which was extremely painful and incurable. He was admitted to hospital, unable to move, and prescribed a course of strong pain-killing drugs. Cousins knew that negative emotions could make you ill, and began to wonder whether positive emotions – and particularly laughter – might make you better. He stopped taking the drugs and moved out of the hospital into a hotel room, which was not only a more cheerful place to be but was also much cheaper. There he hired a lot of comedies and started to watch them. He found that every time he laughed, the laughter acted as an anaesthetic and gave him relief from pain. And the effect lasted some time: 10 minutes’ laughter could give him around two hours free from pain. More important, he found that he was slowly getting better, and eventually recovered completely from the illness. For many years, the medical profession refused to take Cousins’ claims seriously, but now things are changing and some American hospitals have “laughter rooms”, where patients can watch videos or read joke books, instead of sitting around feeling depressed. Laughing for money A Frenchwoman, Jullie Hette, works as a professional laugher. For a fee, she will come and laugh non-stop for you. Her record is 90 minutes. She guarantees that you will soon be laughing with her – even though you might not know what you are laughing about.
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Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1461
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