Blunt Affect and the Consequences of Not Smiling Enough
I’m sorry you have a problem with my face. It’s not something I can fix
Not so long ago, I was rejected from a position because I wasn’t smiling in the picture I attached to my CV.
I was otherwise massively overqualified. For an online job that required no experience, I had years of relevant experience to fall back on. I could also show them credentials that were optional but should have made picking me a no-brainer.
None of that mattered. They repeatedly returned my application no matter what picture I gave them. No smile, no job — period.
Under any other circumstances, I would have written this off as some dumb quirk of that particular company. It wasn’t an important position, anyway — merely a stopgap job to fill the hours between contracts. No big loss.
But not that long ago, I was in contact with someone for a position that actually did matter. He sent me a time and date for a video interview, but the interview never even started. I sat there for more than an hour, wondering what had gone wrong.
When I reached out to my contact again, he informed me that he’d never actually set up the interview. Why? Because — in his words — the picture I sent him didn’t have a “casual smile.” If I didn’t send him a picture of me smiling, he wasn’t even going to make the arrangements.
This was a fairly surreal sequence of events, but upon reflection, it’s not out of step with other events in my life. I think back to a time when I was fired from a second-shift back office job with zero public contact for “having a bad attitude,” and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because I didn’t smile at the manager enough.
I’ve written before about the concept of inappropriate affect, wherein people with certain psychological or neurological conditions may laugh or cry even if that expression doesn’t match their emotions. But inappropriate affect need not be that theatrical. Another variant is blunted affect, meaning that a person simply shows less emotion than others. And this can have greater consequences than you might think.
Many people with autism or other neurological conditions have a constant neutral expression. This might not sound like it would cause too many problems, not when compared to something like hand flapping or rocking. You would be wrong. I can tell you from bitter experience that if you don’t smile all the time, there are emotionally normal people who will casually inflict harm upon you and feel no guilt or remorse over it.
It is not natural (and certainly not “casual”) for me to smile. Find any picture of me smiling going all the way back to childhood, and I assure you that the smile is 100% forced. It is unnatural and even uncomfortable, but it was one of the things I learned to do very early in my life to avoid agitating others.
It’s not like a neurological irregularity is the only reason why someone might not be very demonstrative. Some people come from cultural backgrounds that emphasize propriety and restraint. Some people were raised in households where they were taught to behave in specific ways in public. And some people are just innately stoic.
But stoicism is not valued very highly in American society. Ours is an overstimulated culture where most people won’t react to anything short of a scream in the face, and that already makes things unpleasant for the highly sensitive. Manifestations of emotion are no different.
The prevailing media environment has definitely made this worse. We live in a world that’s heavily influenced by reality TV and ostensibly candid videos in places like YouTube and Instagram. People in the media space don’t take big news with good grace. They react to excitement by shrieking at the top of their lungs, hopping up and down, running in circles and bouncing off the walls. It’s transparently fake, but as this infiltrates our society, people respond the way they think they’re supposed to. That leaves anyone with a stoic demeanor looking ever more freakish.
The more social dimensions are hard to address — it’s not like I can convince the masses not to hate someone who doesn’t smile as much as they’d like. As with so many other little problems, there’s nothing to do but learn to cope.
But it is too much to ask to not get fired for having a different mode of expression?
