Nick Gellatly
The Smile Has a History
This week’s session began with a deceptively simple question: are emotions natural, or do we learn them?
The most convincing answer seems to be both. Biology gives us capacities and dispositions, but our families, cultures and communities teach us how to recognise emotions, how to name them, when to display them and when to keep them hidden. We do not simply feel emotions; we learn how to perform them.
Dr Joe Harley’s lecture on the history of emotions developed this argument through happiness, melancholy, smiling and consumption. The central idea was that emotions have histories. They are not merely biological reactions wearing different cultural costumes. Their meanings, expressions and social acceptability change over time.
That matters because emotions do things. Fear, resentment, hope, grief and collective joy are not decorative details added to historical events afterwards. They influence how people act, what communities tolerate and what societies choose to change.
The smile has a date
Smiling feels instinctive. We tend to respond when someone smiles at us, sometimes before consciously deciding to do so. Yet even the smile has a social history.
Colin Jones’s The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris examines a period when showing one’s teeth in polite society could be considered vulgar. An open-mouthed smile was associated with laughter, lack of control and the lower orders. During the eighteenth century, developments in dentistry, portraiture and cultures of sensibility helped make the visible-toothed smile an acceptable expression of warmth and sincerity.
This does not mean that people had never smiled before. It means that societies changed the circumstances in which particular smiles could be shown, represented and interpreted.
We also discussed the facial-feedback hypothesis: the possibility that forming a smile can affect how we feel. The familiar classroom version involves holding a pencil in the mouth to activate muscles associated with smiling. More recent research offers some support for facial feedback when people deliberately imitate or form expressions, although the evidence for the pencil method itself is less conclusive.
This is a useful reminder that an emotion cannot always be separated neatly into an inner feeling and an outward expression. Sometimes expression follows emotion; sometimes it reinforces it; and sometimes a smile is used to reassure, appease or conceal rather than to communicate happiness.
From providence to personal responsibility
Mark Seymour’s history of global happiness unsettles the word itself. The English word is related to hap: chance, fortune or what happens to us. Happiness was once understood more readily as something received, perhaps through divine providence, rather than a condition each person was expected to manufacture.
During the eighteenth century, happiness moved increasingly from heaven to earth. Philosophers and political thinkers began to treat it as a legitimate human pursuit and, eventually, a concern of government. The American Declaration of Independence famously named the pursuit of happiness as a right, while utilitarian thinkers attempted to turn happiness into a political calculation.
This history leads to a less comfortable modern development. If happiness has changed from a gift into a project, unhappiness can be interpreted as personal failure. We are no longer merely permitted to pursue happiness; we can feel obliged to achieve it, demonstrate it and remain visibly positive.
Modern happiness surveys and international rankings continue this history of measurement. They can help governments take wellbeing seriously, but measurement also introduces comparison. Happiness becomes another table in which countries—and perhaps individuals—can succeed or fall behind.
Seymour’s account is particularly valuable because it recovers alternatives that the dominant English-language concept can obscure. Tim Lomas similarly explores words from other languages that express forms of wellbeing for which English has no simple equivalent. A culture’s emotional vocabulary does not merely describe experience; it can help make different experiences imaginable.
Melancholy, depression and masculinity
The history of melancholy provides an especially clear example of emotions being shaped by social judgement.
Melancholy was once explained through the bodily theory of the four humours, particularly an excess of black bile. It could also be understood through religion, supernatural influence, social position or perceived weakness. Men who expressed sadness might be judged effeminate, with their emotion treated as evidence of a defective character rather than a response to experience.
The word depression existed long before the twentieth century, but its modern medical use emerged gradually. In 1905, the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer proposed using it more broadly in place of melancholia. The history is therefore more complicated than one term suddenly replacing another on a particular date.
This part of the lecture felt personally recognisable. When I was growing up, boys were commonly told not to cry, to “man up” or to “grow a pair.” Those phrases did not remove fear, sadness or vulnerability. They taught boys which feelings could safely be displayed.
The consequences do not disappear in adulthood. If someone has been taught that sadness is weakness, asking for help may feel like failure. The emotion remains, but the language and permission needed to express it have been taken away.
Buying happiness
The lecture then turned from smiling to shopping. Retail therapy may sound modern, but arguments about consumption, luxury and happiness are centuries old.
Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees developed the deliberately provocative proposition that “private vices” could produce “public benefits.” Vanity, luxury and self-interest might be morally questionable, yet the spending they generated could support employment and economic activity. The paradox is that behaviour condemned in an individual may contribute to the prosperity of the wider economy.
The debate continues whenever we distinguish between needs and wants. Consumption can provide pleasure, comfort, creativity and participation. It can also create waste, debt, comparison and a perpetual feeling that what we possess is insufficient.
Our discussion connected these ideas with Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, whose seductive abundance has often been read through Victorian cultures of consumption and desire. It also brought to mind Terry Pratchett’s “Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” in Men at Arms. A person without much money repeatedly buys cheap boots that wear out, while a richer person can buy one durable pair and ultimately spend less. Poverty restricts access not only to possessions but to the economical choices that wealth makes possible.
Alexis de Tocqueville noticed a related contradiction in nineteenth-century England. He encountered an extraordinarily wealthy society alongside extensive pauperism. As more goods became available, people without access to them could experience their deprivation more sharply. This anticipates modern work on social comparison: wellbeing is affected not only by what we have, but by what we see others having.
Which emotions are permitted?
In the seminar, we listed ten negative emotions:
Sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, loneliness, jealousy, disgust and frustration.
We then listed ten positive emotions:
Joy, love, contentment, gratitude, hope, excitement, pride, amusement, serenity and belonging.
The more interesting question was not how many words we could produce, but which emotions society permits us to express.
The answer changes according to age, gender, culture, status and setting. Pride may be understood as healthy confidence in one context and boastfulness in another. Direct eye contact may communicate honesty and respect, or it may be inappropriate when directed towards an older person or someone in authority. Fear may be discussed openly as a reasonable response, or concealed because strength has been defined as appearing unafraid.
Grief may be publicly permitted, but often only for a limited period. My experience in funeral work taught me that society can be generous towards visible mourning immediately after a death and noticeably less comfortable with grief that continues months or years later. The bereaved person has not necessarily changed; the social permission surrounding them has.
There is also a queer dimension to this. Permission to express emotion has never been distributed equally. Affection that appears unremarkable between a heterosexual couple can still attract attention or hostility when expressed between two men or two women. LGBTQ+ people may have to assess the safety of a room before displaying tenderness, anxiety, grief or joy.
The question is therefore not simply, “What do I feel?” It is also, “What am I allowed to feel here—and who decided?”
What this means for the café
This week helped me see the proposed Queerly Beloved café differently.
My initial thoughts were practical: books, coffee, conversation, information, community and a queer-safe environment. We could create a noticeboard, work with the Students’ Union, perhaps establish a Queerly Beloved Society, and use a joint event both for this module and as a café launch.
The history of emotions gives those ideas a stronger foundation. If emotions are learned and practised socially, then the design of a room matters. Furniture, lighting, hospitality, shared rituals and the way people are greeted can affect which feelings become possible.
Creating a space that encourages belonging is not about manufacturing compulsory happiness. It is about creating permission: permission to talk, to sit quietly, to grieve, to laugh, to ask for help or simply to be present without performing cheerfulness.
It also reinforces my idea of including a grief corner. Public spaces often welcome celebration more easily than sorrow. A small area containing appropriate books, information and a comfortable chair would recognise that grief is not a failure of wellbeing. It is part of a human life in which something or someone has mattered.
This provides an important distinction between happiness and hospitality. A café cannot promise to make everyone happy. It can help create the conditions in which people feel safe enough to experience and express a fuller emotional life.
Perhaps that is the real project emerging from this module: not a room where everyone must smile, but one where nobody has to pretend.
References
Coles, N.A. et al. (2022) ‘A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration’, Nature Human Behaviour, 6, pp. 1731–1742. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01458-9
Harley, J. (2026) ‘The History of Emotions and Happiness’. Lecture delivered as part of the Ruskin Module, Anglia Ruskin University, 7 October.
Jones, C. (2014) The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lomas, T. (2018) Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262037488.001.0001
Mandeville, B. (1714) The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits.
Pratchett, T. (1993) Men at Arms. London: Victor Gollancz.
Rossetti, C. (1862) ‘Goblin Market’, in Goblin Market and Other Poems. Cambridge: Macmillan.
Seymour, M. (2023) ‘Global Happiness: From Providential Moments to Hedonic Treadmills?’, in Barclay, K. and Stearns, P.N. (eds.) The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 29–43.
Tocqueville, A. de (1835) Memoir on Pauperism. A modern edition is available in Henderson, C.D. (ed. and trans.) (2021), Memoirs on Pauperism and Other Writings: Poverty, Public Welfare, and Inequality. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
World Happiness Report (2022) ‘Exploring the Biological Basis for Happiness’, World Happiness Report 2022, Chapter 5. Available at: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/exploring-the-biological-basis-for-happiness/
Leave a Reply