kraftiekortie wrote:
A smile uses less muscles than a frown,
That turns out to be not provable either way.
Quote:
There are 43 muscles in the face, most of which are controlled by the seventh cranial nerve (also known as the facial nerve). This nerve exits the cerebral cortex and emerges from your skull just in front of your ears. It then splits into five primary branches: temporal, zygomatic, buccal, mandibular and cervical. These branches reach different areas of the face and enervate muscles that allow the face to twist and contort into a variety of expressions.
However, nobody has really come up with a definitive number for how many muscles it takes to smile or frown -- one person's smile is another person's smirk. Also, not everyone has the same number of facial muscles; some have more, enabling a wider range of expression, while some people actually have 40 percent fewer [source: Devlin].
The truth is that people smile -- and frown -- differently, even when presented with similar stimuli. There is an even wider range of variety when one begins using different expressive muscles for the eyes, mouth, nose and forehead.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/i ... -smile.htmQuote:
A long time ago I heard the adage that it takes something like 43 muscles to frown but only 17 muscles to smile, ergo, we should just smile because it's easier. It wasn't until my first anatomy class in college that I realized these numbers couldn't possibly be right. As far as I can tell, there are only about 36 named muscles of facial expression, and they're not all involved in smiling and frowning. Here they are in alphabetical order
...
So which ones are responsible for smiling and/or frowning? I could hazard a guess, but I'll defer to Dr. David Song, a plastic surgeon and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Hospitals, who was interviewed for a Straight Dope article: Does it take fewer muscles to smile than it does to frown? Counting only the muscles that make significant contributions, he concludes that smiling takes one more muscle than frowning (12 vs. 11).
http://anatomynotes.blogspot.com/2006/0 ... frown.htmlQuote:
... with the aid of David H. Song, MD, FACS, plastic surgeon and assistant professor at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Song, among other things, reconstructs faces — in short, he ought to know. My apologies if this list seems obsessive, but we're going to settle this once and for all. Caveat: Deciding which of the 53 facial muscles are important in smiling or frowning is a bit arbitrary — many make only minor contributions, and depending on the intensity of the expression may not be involved at all.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... s-to-frown
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Last edited by kitesandtrainsandcats on 18 Aug 2017, 5:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.