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Professor Jonathan Kalb's "Give Me a Smile" Published in the New Yorker

Professor Jonathan Kalb, of the Theatre Department, has written an article for The New Yorker about the human smile, "our most important form of nonverbal communication," according to Kalb.  He discusses how humans use them to signal many subtle variations of emotion, and his own struggles to find a new way to express himself after the onset of Bell's palsy, "a common, temporary paralysis brought on by the inflammation of the seventh cranial nerve, which activates the facial muscles" (and thus affects the ability to smile). For Professor Kalb, the struggle to smile after the palsy struck had as much to do with his own feelings of well-being, as with the negative reaction of others to the paralysis; he notes that "happiness results in smiling, but the converse is also true: the act of smiling can create feelings of happiness."

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