Why Don't Babies Smile from Birth? | Hacker News Reader

Why Don't Babies Smile from Birth?

blogs.scientificamerican.com

The author's implied premise that a smile is a universal form of emotional expression vs a cultural adaptation was presented in the Darwin paper he cited: "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals". Interestingly, a 2012 paper tested this hypothesis:

"In sum, our data directly show that across cultures, emotions are expressed using culture-specific facial signals. Although some basic facial expressions such as fear and disgust (2) originally served as an adaptive function when humans “existed in a much lower and animal-like condition” (ref. 1, p. 19), facial expression signals have since evolved and diversified to serve the primary role of emotion communication during social interaction. As a result, these once biologically hardwired and universal signals have been molded by the diverse social ideologies and practices of the cultural groups who use them for social communication."

"Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal", http://www.pnas.org/content/109/19/7241

Alas, the ability to smile is something that is innate, and some babies do smile right after birth. (rare, but it happens), but it is not necessary tied to emotional content.

"Neonatal smiling occurs from birth to one month of age and shows no emotional content. Smiles are spontaneous and often occur while the baby is drowsy or during REM stages of sleep. Baby smiles are subcortical in origin and will actually decrease with maturity (so premature babies smile more than full-term babies)."

Also there is proof that babies seems to be able to smile even though they are uborn/ still in the womb, which means the ability to smile is a universal human trait that is culture independent.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-196020/Babies-smil...

Ours did it right after birth - I know one shouldn‘t prescribe meaning to it but it‘s really quite something seeing it. I got photos but I guess I shouldn‘t upload publicly.

The ability to smile is not necessarily connected to the meaning of a smile, though. The article seems to assume a connection between smiling and happiness that isn't necessarily supported. (A good explanation of such a connection would need to contrast it to other aspects of communication which we don't question the cultural basis for.)

What you saying is one side of speculation/explanation. The article particularly mentions that when babies are in the womb, they feel content and that's what the smiling is, but we don't know if it is for sure. (i.e. it can be just a reflex, or actual display of being "content").

Smiling, however, cannot be interpreted as preparation for birth but may be a reflex, Prof Campbell said.

He added: "What's behind the smile, of course, I can't say, but the corners turn up and the cheeks bulge ... I think it must be some indication of contentment in a stress-free environment."

in any way, so socialization is a big part of it. We know most humans are born with the ability of speech, but if they are not taught/socialized at early age, then they will never be able to speak later (apart from uttering primitive sounds), but they still can utter sounds.

It could be the same with smiling. All humans are born with the ability of a 'primitive smile' which can be further developed and refined socially, but ability is innate.

The studies that mention that all smiling is socialized is yet another wave of bunk science that tries to attribute "socializing" and indoctrination to every human behavior, where there are clear indication that it is not true.

http://www.doctortipster.com/6920-smiling-is-an-inherited-be...

> The ability to smile is not necessarily connected to the meaning of a smile, though.

Pediatricians call it a "social smile", and it is an important milestone in newborn development. See https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/babys-first-social-smil....

Evolutionary, I think the intention is to bring parents further under the baby's spell, since otherwise they might give up because taking care of a baby is a lot of work!

More than parents which are attached to the child with hormones, the smile is for the strangers so they do not harm them. At some stage babies smile all the time to strangers. That's before they get older and understand the concept of parents vs strangers.

Our baby is a fascinating example of this - every time he sees a stranger he makes a big smile.

He seems to just love people, and because of his big eyes and big smile it is rare that I can take him shopping, or for a walk, without at least one stranger talking to me about how happy he looks.

Ya, same here, though it seems to be tapering off after 1.

Cross-species, the opposite of 'smile at strangers' that I had to learn was when handling distressed dogs.

To a human a smile is cute, to a dog it is baring of teeth in a challenge.

I got smiled at by a 9 month old on the plane just yesterday, the subtext was, "please don't eat me or my family."

... don't leave us hanging, what did you do?

Did you let the infant assert dominance, or did his parents learn a lesson about the social hierarchy?

Babies 'smiling' can also indicate gas.

That is an old wives tale. It's not actually true. But people love repeating it because it sounds funny.

Interesting, I'll have to look into this. A quick search was inconclusive but showed a split between "sciency" sources (saying no relation between infant smiles and gas) and "parenty" sources saying it's gas. Thanks!

That actually sounds pretty conclusive to me.

I meant 'inconclusive' as in "in 2 minutes of searching I found a couple of papers whose abstracts said no causation between gas and smiling, and about four of five 'mummy-type' sites that asserted the correlation." To me that points to 'no causation' being the likely case but I'm not going to just declare it as proven on the basis of the first two papers I turned up.

For some babies it's definitely true. Ours makes a very cute open mouth smile when she is trying to push gas (or poop) out. You don't need a scientific study to tell you that a big smile while grunting, followed by a big fart or dirty diaper several times a day makes the smile a sign.

That paper refutes very little by using adult humans. Some facial expressions are universal among human cultures and even among primates, and yes, even among mammals.

Liking and disliking facial reactions to sweet or bitter water are universal among mammals.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a511/cb9d06d0f77132cad2ba5f...

And relevant to the topic of this post and the original article, human babies will in fact smile when given sweet tastes right after birth.

> Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) [...]

What the fuck. It's either "happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness" or "happy, surprised, afraid, disgusted, angry, and sad". I can't help but feel that there is something very wrong with a mind that would mix up the pattern like they did. It's very difficult for me to take the paper seriously after this. I would forgive it if all the authors were Chinese, but most of the names are western enough.

It's difficult for me to take your comment and criticism seriously with a leading phrase like "what the fuck" in regards to a grammatical error.

That papers use of modeled faces makes me skeptical. The data proves their conclusion but they also made the facial models and didn’t use real faces experiencing emotions

Because the two most magical things in the early stages of parenthood are:

* when the baby consciously smiles at you for the first time (they will often smile in their sleep, but that's "only" cute);

* when the baby laughs for the first time - doing something that's funny enough to them for them to vocalize their pleasure can be a challenge!

Disclaimer / anecdata source: once-again father, four month old.

youngest father known to men

Both my kids took forever to smile it seemed.

Like you said though they'd smile and even laugh in their sleep all the time... but then when awake all business / serous.

I thought I recalled reading in the past that babies actually can't see very far in the newborn stages. The fact that the areola and nipple are super high contrast to the surrounding skin and whose dimensions are optimally situated for a babies focal length is a mark of that. Scent and sound play large roles in the early stages. Our baby would respond to her siblings voices since she's heard and played with them since in utero. It would make sense that the most capable sense would develop more utility. I recall reading a story where a musician was said to have dived into a new body of work to study some cello concerto or something he's never been exposed to or learned before. But as he dived into it he found it all so strangely familiar. He brought that up to his mother of this strange dejavu like experience and she had then told him that when he was in the womb she was vigorously mastering that piece herself.

> “Being happy requires a fair amount of self-referential thinking, whereas being in pain or being unhappy doesn’t require that in the same way,” he suggested. “To be happy, you have to know that you’re happy.

This doesn't seem right at all. Just like pain doesn't require self-referential thinking, neither should pleasure.

My sons only smiled when they were sleeping, and presumably dreaming, until they were about 6 months. But they smiled while they were sleeping since birth (4 or 5 days old technically).

When they finally did smile while awake it was at a stuffed monkey.

> Their facial muscles work fine, but the neural networks that let them recognize the feeling of happiness take a while to develop

I like it when an article has a TL,DR; as a subtitle.

Here's (another) SA article[1] that seems to somewhat counter the claims found here; namely, that joy, laughter, and humor are not "culturally adapted" but built into our neural correlates. This is a famous (and ground-breaking) study conducted by Jaak Panksepp[2].

Maybe smiling is culturally-specific, but laughter certainly isn't. I'm not sure if there's much of a difference between the two -- to me it seems to be a difference of intensity (of emotion) and not a difference in kind.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rats-laugh-but-no...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaak_Panksepp

Sorta related, the Still Face Experiment is one of the most disturbing things I've seen on the internet.