Photo: AFPThe subject of centuries of scrutiny and debate, Mona Lisa's famous smile is routinely described as ambiguous. In an unusual trial, close to 100 percent of people described her expression as unequivocally "happy", researchers revealed on Friday. All in the contextA second phase of the experiment involved the original Mona Lisa with eight "sadder" versions, with even more nuanced differences in the lip tilt. In this test, the original was still described as happy, but participants' reading of the other images changed. "There may be some ambiguity in another aspect," said Kornmeier, but "not ambiguity in the sense of happy versus sad."

Source: The Local March 11, 2017 09:56 UTC