Smile and the world smiles with you. Fake it and the recently divorced, socially unpopular and romantically rejected will be onto you.

This is the conclusion of a new study that shows people who have been cast off or excluded have an enhanced ability to determine whether the "happy" face before them is genuine or feigned.

Researchers from Miami University found subjects who were manipulated to feel rejection were able to tell a fake smile from a real one roughly 80 per cent of the time, while the odds of doing so among people with a sense of inclusion were only slightly better than chance.

Lead author Michael Bernstein, whose study appears in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science, believes this skill is an adaptive behaviour rooted in "reaffiliation." That is, the ability to detect legitimate signs of warmth can prevent social pariahs from wasting their time trying to ingratiate themselves with people who aren't sympathetic.

"When we were living in caves and hitting boars over the head, getting kicked out of the group was akin to being deprived of food or water or shelter," says Bernstein. "People who were better able to find their way back into groups after being rejected were more likely to survive and thus procreate."

Some of the researchers had predicted the opposite effect would occur - that excluded people would so crave affiliation that they'd interpret any smile as the real thing. But their experiments showed that even something as mild as recalling a time when one was rejected was enough to enhance a person's powers of perception.

"What our study shows is that we can make social cue-readers out of anyone, just by making them think about a time they were excluded from a group," says Bernstein.
He believes the findings have valuable implications for professions that demand sensitivity to put-ons - such as poker players, lawyers, police officers and politicians.

A Canadian expert on facial expressions says the general thinking is that making and recognizing looks of happiness, sadness, anger, pride and, to a lesser extent, contempt, aren't learned behaviours but rather innate abilities. Those abilities can, however, be either enhanced or falsified depending on the circumstances.

"The more genuine smile involves turned-up lip corners and crinkles around the eyes," says Jessica Tracy, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. "So it's not like you can't fake that. We have control over those muscles. It's just that most people don't think to do it."

An ostracism scholar says the new study's results are in line with literature showing even brief periods of exclusion can make someone more perceptive to signals of acceptance.

"We will typically increase our social attentiveness and become more open to other people, and maybe even less discriminating about the groups we choose to belong to," says Kipling Williams, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. "But at the same time, it can create people who are overly attentive to what other people think rather than letting themselves march to the beat of their own drum. So it's a two-edged sword."

MP Bill Siksay, the current NDP candidate for Burnaby-Douglas, says he was forced to navigate rejection of all kinds while training to become a minister in 1979, a time when the United Church wouldn't ordain an openly gay man such as himself.

And although today he tries "not to over-analyze people," Siksay says his previous social experiences "absolutely" gave him insight to the ways in which fellow politicians and constituents behave when they are, or aren't, genuinely receptive.

"It teaches you something about coalition-building," says Siksay. "You don't make any kind of social change without support, and looking for support in strange places sometimes."