First stage: You see an expressive face You need to know what the expression means so you can react effectively.

When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you

Contagious smiling (and frowning and scowling and so on) is the basis of reading others' emotions and registering how you should, in turn, feel.

We tend to mimic the smiles or frowns of others because it helps us better understand what other people are feeling, allowing us to respond appropriately.

Evidence shows that an instinct for facial mimicry allows us to empathize with and even experience other people's feelings.

“Facial mimicry certainly plays some role, and perhaps a key role, in understanding other people’s emotional states,” Dr. Kevin Ochsner

A person's ability to recognize and "share" others' emotions can be inhibited when they can't mimic faces, even from something as simple as long-term pacifier use.

you mimic their expression unconsciously, which then tells your brain what to feel. All this happens in a few hundred milliseconds.

We are unconsciously learning things by what we see and that's why infants mimic their parents behavior. When they smile to them, they smile back.

Each time you smile, you throw a little feel-good party in your brain. The act of smiling activates neural messaging that benefits your health and happiness.

smiling activates the release of neuropeptides that work toward fighting off stress.

the serotonin release brought on by your smile serves as an anti-depressant/mood lifter.

when you view a person smiling, you actually feel rewarded.

When you smile,you are creating a symbiotic relationship that allows both of you to release feel-good chemicals in your brain, activate reward centers, make you both more attractive, and increase the chances of you both living longer, healthier lives.

Second stage: You simulate the facial expression Simulation uses the same areas of your brain that cause your facial expressions- it may therefore cause you to mimic the expression.

Third stage: The simulation tells you how it feels to make that expression The context or your knowledge about the expresser may have an influence.

This quick, automatic, and unconscious process allows you to connect the subtle emotion signals of others to your own emotion experiences.

Smiling makes us happier Smiling triggers a reduction in stress-enhancing hormones and increases the production of mood-enhancing hormones.

Even forcing a “fake” smile when you’re not truly feeling it has been shown to reduce stress and result in more positive feelings.

Genuine smiles might help people see eye-to-eye during interactions. People who often make genuine smiles may have an easier time convincing others to adopt their goals.

The world is simply a better place when you smile.

But God, who is immortal, has no need of difference of sex, nor of succession.

You can play pickup basketball, but you can't really re-create football.

We try to be driven by whats a good story whats truthful and the drama of what happens next.

I love the fact that people don't see the ukulele as a serious instrument. A lot of people see it as more of a toy, and I love that because it just proves that people aren't intimidated by the instrument. They aren't afraid to pick it up.

I know some people who've gotten tattoos that they probably shouldn't have, like the name of somebody they were dating, and that never ends well.

Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.

The Internet opens up so many doors. It's a phenomenal tool for education but also a way for people to be scary and dangerous. We're living in a world where we can be hacked and exposed.

Choose success first, no matter what—then back yourself into a career.

When Landon Carter, a Virginia plantation owner, read the Declaration of Independence two days after it was issued, he wondered whether its ringing affirmation of equality meant that slaves must be freed. If so, he confided to his diary, 'You must send them out of the country, or they must steal for their support.'

The prudent embark when the sea is calm

I love New York - maybe more than Los Angeles or London. I think I'm happiest in New York.

I was conveniently bisexual for a long time, and then I went, 'Come on, who am I kidding?' And I have to say, it was the single biggest step I took toward emotional well-being, to stop feeling like I had to hide who I am.

When he emerged Lou Dobbs the populist, he was so hard to peg. A mishmash of contradictions: anti-outsourcing, anti-globalization, pro-international-trade, pro-free-enterprise, anti-corporatism, pro-choice, pro-Second Amendment, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gays-serving-openly-in-the-military, pro-military, anti-war-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough.

Don't let anyone's ignorance, hate, drama or negativity stop you from being the best person you can be.

I had a daughter and lost her a long while ago. That's too sad a story to go into.

I was on the speech team, we called it forensics.

In my films, I either want the music to be very subtle and very buried or just put it right out in front and be super blunt with it.

In secondary school I was floating - I wasn't passionate about anything. I did a little sport, but it was pretty joyless because the competitiveness was too much to bear.

I have no obligation to deal with slime.

Life is rough for a lot of people. Some people live in greater material circumstances than others, but life is rough for everybody.

Personality is reduced and deformed with depleted thoughts and stagnant mind.

Monotony kills the heart. Ironically, monotony is what keeps the heart working.

At some point, I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it; that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.