Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Thursday, February 24, 2005  

It's the Smile, stupid!

Fascinating article on a study of the differences between an American and an English smile; also, on what a smile tells us about the smiler. Did you know that:

. . . research has shown that women smile more than men in public, but stop smiling in private.

The power behind the smile may also be more potent than anybody has previously realised: Keltner recently released a study of photographs of women in college yearbooks dating back to the 1960s in which he separated the Duchenne smilers from the artfully posed.

Researchers then tracked the women down and found that those who had smiled most happily at college overwhelmingly tended to have had the happiest lives since they had graduated. “It’s a virtuous circle,” Keltner concluded. “Happy smiley people cheer others up around them, which in turn makes them more stable and less prone to depression or divorce than those who faked it in their yearbooks.”

posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:24 PM |

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