Another example of a pervasive signal recently being studied by human ecological behaviorists is smiling. In a purely zoological sense, smiling can be classified as an instinct. At 2 to 4 months, babies begin to smile and receive more caress and warmth from their parents immediately. In the words of zoologists, a smile is a social reliever, an innate, relatively constant signal that coordinates basic social relationships, anthropologist Melvin Connor recently completed a study of Kunzang in South Africa's Kalahari Desert A study of smiles and other infant and toddler behaviors in infants from the genus ("bush people"). When he began his daily observation, he "decided to remember what to remember, and to write it down according to the facts", because Kunsang children were raised under conditions very different from Western popular culture, and they were born by their mothers alone without anesthesia. In the following months, they maintained almost uninterrupted physical contact with their mothers or nannies, and for the first three or four years, they were mostly placed upright when awake, fed several times an hour, and were more often than European and American children. Strictly trained to sit, stand, and walk, however, their smile patterns, appearing at the same age as American children, seem to function in exactly the same way, and more convincing evidence is that even blind children, Even deaf and blind children can produce smiles in the absence of any known psychological conditions conducive to laughter.
It is entirely possible that this simplest and most automatic behavior is the result of a direct genetic link between human brain cells and the facial nerve, which allows the contraction patterns of facial muscles to pass through a series of physiological events during early postnatal development. can develop, and these physiological activities can be mastered with only the simplest learning. In the future, more rigorous research is likely to reveal the existence of genetic variation that affects the pattern and intensity of neuromuscular activity. If these unexpectedly simple phenomena It did happen, and their discovery would set the stage for our first entry into the genetics of human communication.
View more about Lie to Me reviews