Comment by squarefoot
5 years ago
My personal take on smiles is that they're welcome if genuine, but can have adverse effects when forced. Many people think that displaying a fake smile for example at the workplace would help with interactions, especially professional ones, but rest assured that when I see someone faking a smile, particularly those working hard to look warm and sincere, I immediately feel I could be manipulated and get on the defensive. ...But I speak from personal experience of being shown daily the widest warm smile at the workplace from the same person that a few months later would dig my professional grave, so your mileage will probably vary.
I live in a culture where being nice and smiling to people is the norm. It's really nice interacting with strangers because they'll always nice and smiles at you (even road rage is particularly rare), but this also makes backstabbing office politics particularly painful, especially when you're still expected to display nice and smiling behaviour even after such backstabbing.
I guess you can't have the best of both world for this stuff.
IME, there's basically no correlation between your facial expression and whether you respect and work well with others. Someone who just smiles at you all the time is going to either seem nutty, or at best look like he's being really nervous and trying to find humor in the interaction somehow. It's a sign of weakness and might make others take you less seriously. On the flip side a firm expression and stiff upper lip can also connote respect for others.