Two Smiles, Two Bodies: What Your Face Does to Your Athletes

This episode examines Furley & Thrien's 2024 paper called "A Smile Can Go a Long Way: The Effects of Dominant and Rewarding Smiles of Coaches on Athletes in an Evaluative Performance Context." The big ideas from the paper are Two Smiles, Two Bodies, The Mood Thief, and The Silent Signal. All three of these big ideas contribute to the two - actually three in this episode - immediately applicable actions for coaches. 

The show notes for this episode can be found here: https://thecoachdeveloper.com/coaching-research-to-results-podcast-notes/

Transcript

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Every coach has heard the advice. Smile more, stay positive, and show warmth. It's coaching 101. But here's what nobody tells you: not all smiles are equal. Two coaches could be smiling at the exact same moment after the exact same performance, and one of them is raising their athlete's heart rate and pulling their mood south, while the other is literally calming them down physiologically. And the athletes can't tell the difference. This week's research is about what your face is doing to your athletes in the seconds after they perform, without a single word being spoken. And you might be surprised to find out which spile you're actually giving. This is the podcast where coaching research gets off the shelf, out of your notes, and into your practice. Let's go! The paper is called A Smile Can Go a Long Way: The Effects of Dominant and Rewarding Smiles of Coaches on Athletes in an Evaluative Performance Context. It was published in 2024 in the International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching. The lead author is Philip Furley from the German Sport University Cologne with co-author Fanny Trian. Furley's research group specializes in nonverbal behavior in sport, and this paper builds directly on a 2018 study showing that different smile types could alter the body's stress response system in a lab context. They wanted to know whether the same thing happens between coaches and athletes in sport. They put 60 athletes through stressful tasks while being evaluated by a high performance coach over what they thought was a live video call. Here's what they found. The big idea from this paper can be called Two Smiles, Two Bodies. The core finding is this. Athletes who received a dominant smile from their coach after their performance had measurably higher heart rates than athletes who received a rewarding smile. Same athletes, same task, same performance context, just a different type of smile. The dominant smile is slightly asymmetrical, a raised upper lip, a little bit of I'll be the judge of that energy. The rewarding smile is warm, eyebrows up, full with genuine approval. The researchers tracked heart rate across eight feedback moments, and the dominant smile group consistently showed more heart rate reactivity. The reward smile group? Their heart rate actually buffered against stress. The smile was physiologically calming. So right now, think about what your face does in the five seconds after an athlete finishes a task in front of you. Do you actually know? Idea two is called the mood thief. After the physical tasks, athletes who received dominant smiles reported feeling significantly less happy than those who received rewarding smiles, and these athletes thought that they were performing for a spot on a national or state team. The stakes felt real. A single facial expression from an authority figure was enough to pull the emotional floor out from under them. A reward smile, by contrast, protected an even slightly lifted mood after the same difficult task. The implication for coaching is direct. Every time your face responds to a performance, you are doing something to the athlete's emotional state, whether you intend it or not. The question is not whether you're giving a signal. You always are. The question is whether you are choosing that signal. Idea three builds on that and it is called the silent signal. This is the strangest finding in the whole study. The athletes who received dominant smiles had higher heart rates and lower mood, but they did not report feeling more stressed. Their self-reported stress levels were identical to the reward smile group. Let that sit for a second. Their bodies were responding to something their conscious minds had not fully registered. The impact of the smile was happening below the level of awareness. The athlete does not walk away thinking, that looks stressed me out. They just feel a bit flat, a little less energized, and they can't name why. This matters enormously for coaches, because an athlete who can't name what's affecting them can't tell you. So you don't find out. And in the next session, something has shifted and nobody quite knows where it all started. Let's complicate the picture a bit, as good research demands. The study was conducted in a laboratory with a pre-recorded video of a coach the athletes had never met delivered via a simulated video stream. That's a considerable difference from a real training environment with a coach the athletes know and have worked with for months or years. The authors acknowledge this clearly themselves. Real coaching involves physical proximity, emotional history, and a far richer nonverbal environment than a screen. It's plausible the effects would be amplified in person, but that has not yet been tested. Here's something else worth noting. The automated facial coding software found almost no significant differences in the athletes' own facial expressions based on which smile they received. So whatever those smiles were doing to the athletes on the inside, it wasn't obviously registering on their faces. This is a finding in progress, not settled science. Replications in actual coaching environments are still needed. When I apply this to my own coaching, my temperament is pretty consistent and I don't tend to experience large emotional fluctuations. I'm told that my facial expressions generally model this too. However, I know instinctively that smiling helps me to connect with other humans, along with a host of other nonverbal actions that I try to pay attention to. So this paper was quite interesting to me. The brief story here is of an athlete who needed more regular and almost constant acknowledgement of their successes. They just felt supported with more regular connections and affirmations. Luckily, they were clever and hardworking and regularly performed consistently well in games and practices, so when I gave a smile to recognize success, it was justified. I think, but I don't know for sure, that I was giving a rewarding smile each time since that's what seemed to be a support factor for this athlete. I wish I could go back in time and see, which is an excellent transition into the follow-up actions for this research. Action one, and this is a just-in-time learning opportunity for coaches. At your next practice, before you respond to any performance moment, give yourself a deliberate one-second pause and ask, what is my face about to do? Pick three to five moments across a session where an athlete completes a task and consciously choose to deliver a warm, genuine, approving expression if the performance warrants. The research shows the reward smile involves eyebrows up and a full symmetrical cheek lift, the kind of face you make when you're actually pleased, not just attempting to seem positive. After practice, notice whether the athletes who got the signal came back with more energy on their next attempt. You're running a small experiment on your own sideline and the data is right there in front of you in what happens next. Action two. Ask someone who watches you coach, an assistant, a trusted parent in the stands, or just catch a short video clip from your phone propped up nearby, to pay attention to your default face in the three to five seconds immediately after an athlete completes a task. Not to judge you, just to report back. Most coaches are genuinely surprised by what their feedback face looks like from the outside. If you discover a tendency towards the dominant expression, the knowing is already half of the fix. You can't change a habit you've never seen. Action three. Yes, and I'm breaking the rules today and giving a third possible action. Want a challenge? This one ups the ante. Pay specific attention to your face right after a performance you did not love. That's the highest risk moment in this research, the moment when the dominant expression is most likely to appear before your brain can intercept it. This week, try a deliberate three-second pause before responding to any performance that disappoints or frustrates you. Use that pause to separate your emotional reaction from your evaluative signal. You're not hiding your honest assessment. You're deciding on when and how to deliver it and protecting the athlete's next attempt in the process. The one thing I want you to leave with. Athletes are reading your face as a performance review constantly, and it could be changing their body and their mood below the emotional level where they can even name it. Two smiles that look similar from the outside can produce two measurably different athletes on the inside. That is not intuition. That is heart rate data. If you want to go further, Philip Furley has an extensive body of work on nonverbal behavior in sport that is well worth your time. I'm Beth Barts, the Coach Developer. You'll find show notes and the full library of episodes at www.thecoachdeveloper.com. If any idea from today lands for you, like, subscribe, and share it with another coach this week. That's how research actually travels. See you next time. This podcast was produced by Anne Reichenstein at RECETA services. Original music created and recorded by Sean Patterson at Vinyl Safari Studio.