You may be the world's leading expert on the smile. Do you use smiley faces in your own email?
I have only just commenced doing this as a method of drawing attention to my publisher that I need to speak to him. I would have to say that I do not, normally. I started to notice it and have become more and more aware of it as I started working on this book.
Why did you decide to write your book?
It started its life as a presentation to a conference of dentists. The idea of giving a formal talk to a scientific meeting of hundreds of dentists was absolutely terrifying, but in fact, it was very warmly received. The radical techniques that surgery -- you know, shoring up and colouring and restructuring bones in the face, the head, the skull, the jaw -- can now achieve means that there is this huge set of options for patients who choose to renovate their face.
You're well read on the psychology of the smile. Do you think people who use lots of smiley faces in email are happier? More fun to be around?
I think not. It is a little bit like people who overuse explanation marks. You tend to react with complete scepticism. I may be a cynical middle-aged Australian -- but if at the end of a message in which I am asked for something, there appears a little smiley, I tend to react negatively. But obviously, if one receives a message from a person that one knows and loves and that person is in the habit of using a smiley to sign off, one obviously reads these things completely differently.
This runs to the issue of the psychology of smiling. We might choose to read the smile in the face of the person we fancy as a definite sign of encouragement. Whereas in fact, what we really ought to be reading is sort of faint pity or a sign that the person is tolerating this for the time being but cannot wait to leave the room.
Smiles are used in social situations as a kind of conversational lubricant. Does the same thing happen online?
That's definitely changing. I was amazed to see the other day an evolutionary smiley that has three eyes. What's that all about? Who would understand it, if he got that attached to an email? I do not know. I think I probably would think that the writer was insane.
