Washington: Your smile mirroring the image of your parents is not because over a period of time you have started mimicking their style, but more likely the result of your inheriting their genes.
To separate the impact of mimicry from genetic inheritance, scientists at the University of Haifa and Israel, looked at people who were born blind.
The authors note that their blind subjects considered it to be a common public misconception that they can learn expressions by touch.
The participants said that without a mental model of what a face looks like, it is hard to translate expressions felt through the hands to expressions on their own face.
Eviatar Nevo and his colleagues asked their 21 blind participants, along with 30 relatives of these people, to reflect on a particular memory or idea that evoked emotion, and filmed the results.
By the end of the interviews they had catalogued 43 different types of facial expressions (several being sequences of expressions), some of which were shared between people.
The researchers found that a blind person's expression was matched to the group that contained their family members 80 per cent of the time. That convinced the team that there was a hereditary signature behind the smiles and grimaces.
Of all the expressions, anger was the most likely to be similar between relatives, followed by surprise, disgust, joy, sadness, and finally, concentration.
The results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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