Can you spot a fake smile? Initial analyses of Richard Wiseman's research showed that males and females were equally good at detecting fake smiles based on intuition.

Can you spot a fake smile? If you can, it's probably based on your intuition rather than physical differences between the two. When I suspect a fake smile, it's usually because of the general feeling I get about the person, like if they are trying too hard to make a good impression or if they are (unconvincingly) pretending to be interested in a topic.

In July 2006, psychologist Richard Wiseman went out to the New Zealand International Science Festival and conducted an experiment to see if people could distinguish between a fake and a genuine smile based on intuition. Participants were asked to look at ten pairs of photographs of smiling faces; each pair contained one fake smile and people had to pick out the genuine one.

Wiseman was drawing on previous research that showed that women consider themselves more intuitive than men. But his initial analysis of the results did not support this - both men and women identified 72% of the real smiles.

Would the results have been the same if they had been looking at the people themselves rather than photographs? There seems to be a lot of body language accompanying smiles that can be a giveaway. But there are also physical characteristics to a genuine smile that can cast away any doubts of a fraud...

In the 19th century, a French neurologist called Guillaume Duchenne did research on muscles and muscular disorders and would stimulate muscles electrically to see how they contract. He discovered that the zygomaticus muscle near the mouth was used to produce a smile and that a true smile involved more than just muscles around the mouth - those around the eyes were involved as well. A genuine smile has since been called a 'Duchenne smile'.