(FORTUNE Magazine) – The American Psychological Association recently held its annual meeting -- it was in Washington, D.C., this year -- and as usual we sent away for the program and a sampling of the papers submitted. Our theory about these proceedings is that they constitute a kind of instant clue to where it's at with the New Class. The New Class, a.k.a. the ''Knowledge Class,'' consists of highly educated people who work at producing and disseminating information. On average, they are over to the left politically. ''The new knowledge class in Western societies is a major antagonist of capitalism,'' correctly states Peter L. Berger in The Capitalist Revolution. At APA conventions in recent years, radicalized psychologists could be quite regularly observed barging into assorted public-policy areas. You could see them laboriously linking the discipline of psychology to the nuclear freeze or various themes of concern to organized feminism. The feminists were visible again this year, notably in two separate symposiums on comparable worth. And yet, based on the papers submitted for the convention, we are cheerfully rating it one of the most nonpolitical in years. Furthermore, there is real news in some of those papers. For example, the ''facial feedback hypothesis'' has been confirmed in experiments performed by academics Fritz Strack and Leonard L. Martin. The hypothesis posits that people don't just smile because they feel good. In part, at least, the act of smiling helps them to feel better. People who were physically prevented from laughing under laboratory conditions found jokes to be less funny than did those for whom laughing was facilitated. Alas, the paper does not mention which jokes were employed in the experiments. But we assume they were nonpolitical.