A Russian friend of mine explained that it's sort of inappropriate to go around smiling, esp for males. There's also kind of a cultural thing going on where Russians perceive themselves as being able to screw up almost any situation. It seems there's a lot of black/gallows humor oriented around this bleak outlook.
> A Russian friend of mine explained that it's sort of inappropriate to go around smiling, esp for males.
This is very true. If a male is smiling, it means he is showing his submission and in turn is subconsciously treated by other males as a lower level male. The exact system of hierarchy signs exists in chimps. For me it seems like russians together with some other cultures managed to save this body language component as meaningful way of interaction, in contrast with western way of smiling meaning level zero relationship. Because if you truly can not tell fake smile from real one, the meaning of a smile is lost. That's why I also am not going to ever accept "always smiling" thing, even if I would go to live in western country. A smile should be a sign of affection, not a sign of neutral stance. We have neutral face impression for that. And if you interpret neutral face impression as "something wrong", what are you using "worried" face impression? It just seems wrong to always smile, even considering "brain hacking" thing.
Why are you assuming that we can not tell the difference between smiles? There's a huge gradation of social behavior w.r.t smiles and other social cues that we use in the west. For us, raised in the culture, it is trivially easy to tell the difference between, say, the smile of a shopkeeper in greeting, the smile of an enemy, the smile of a shopkeeper after asking after your parent (they slightly know you), the smile of the mail man you speak with once a week or so, the smile of the semi-acquaintance that lives one flight up, the smile of a friend you see each day, and the smile of a best friend when reuniting after a long absence. so on. They are all different, and constitute a "meaningful way of interaction". It's just different than your way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_jokes#The_Golden_Fish may be one of my favorites on there.
A Russian friend of mine explained that it's sort of inappropriate to go around smiling, esp for males. There's also kind of a cultural thing going on where Russians perceive themselves as being able to screw up almost any situation. It seems there's a lot of black/gallows humor oriented around this bleak outlook.