GOOD RELATIONS: A winning smile can take you places

THE value of a smile, which shows recognition, acknowledgement, appreciation or just understanding for someone trying to cope with challenging circumstances, can raise one's spirits and build good relations.

It is an expression denoting greeting, pleasure, sociability, happiness or amusement.

Smiling is perceived as a positive emotion most of the time, and it has favourable influence upon others and makes one affable and more approachable.

At times and in some cultures, however, it can also denote shallowness, confusion, coping with emotional pain, a sign of embarrassment, dishonesty or even being cheeky, disrespectful or concealing one's anger.

These differences are evident when we can figure out whether a smile is spontaneous or genuine. It may merely be a polite smile.

There is also the mischievous smile.

A team of British academics at a university in Wales claims to have developed a computer software to test people's responses when someone's face cracks into a smile.

The researchers say smiles act as a form of "social currency -- a valuable reward that people will pay to receive".

Smiling has the capacity, for instance, to lure shoppers to buy something, help close a deal, create or strengthen relationships, and mostly, encourage collaboration and productivity in work.

A smile is comforting and encouraging to the troubled, harried, broken-hearted and afflicted.

However, all this doesn't imply we should start flashing fake smiles at everyone, hoping we will get whatever we want and that others will be impressed with us.

A smile -- no matter how cleverly we may try to make out its sincerity -- can remain a mystery or simply keep haunting us. Based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa painting, a popular 1950 Oscar Award winning song crooned by Nat King Cole says in a line from its lyrics: "You're so like the lady with the mystic smile".

Another Academy Award-winning song in 1958, by Johnny Mathis, A Certain Smile, the theme song of the film with the same title, says in the last stanza: "But in the hush of night, exactly like a bittersweet refrain, comes that certain smile to haunt your heart again."

Generally, if people perceive that others are friendly, they will build stronger relationships.

We know that people's social networks can be an important determinant of longevity and health -- a kind of social networking that isn't possible to carry out on Facebook or Twitter!