SAY CHEESE: There's a relationship between childhood smiles, as shown in photos, and adult marriage success, a study shows.
Image: iStockphoto
-
The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
Read More »
Pictures of grinning kids may reveal more than childhood happiness: a study from DePauw University shows that how intensely people smile in childhood photographs, as indicated by crow’s feet around the eyes, predicts their adult marriage success.
According to the research, people whose smiles were weakest in snapshots from childhood through young adulthood were most likely to report being divorced in middle and old age. Among the weakest smilers in college photographs, one in four ended up divorcing, compared with one in 20 of the widest smilers. The same pattern held among even those pictured at an average age of 10.
The paper builds on a 2001 study by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, that tracked the well-being and marital satisfaction of women from college through their early 50s. That work found that coeds whose smiles were brightest in their senior yearbook photographs were most likely to be married by their late 20s, least likely to remain single into middle age, and happiest in their marriage; they also scored highest on measures of overall well-being (including psychological and physical difficulties, relationships with others and general self-satisfaction).
The scientists speculate that one’s tendency to grin—an example of what psychologists call “thin slices” of behavior that can belie personal traits—reflects his or her underlying emotional disposition. Positive emotionality influences how others respond to a person, perhaps making that individual more open and likely to seek out situations conducive to a lasting, happy marriage.
But there could be a more cynical explanation, according to Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw who led the new study. “Maybe people who look happier in photos show a social face to others,” he says. “Those may be the same people who are likely to put up with partners because they don’t want to appear unhappy.”
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Say Cheese."
See what we're tweeting about
24 Comments
Add CommentIt makes perfect sense, people with positive emotional dispositions will incur fewer damaging effects from a dispute or confrontation, because they will be more cooperative and compromising and it won't ever be serious enough to damage relationships. Unlike people who fly off the handle and stubbornly never let off their position in a confrontation or dispute. I know such people and can say they are all drama and not happy as much as frustrated and stressed. And being happy more often means you will smile more, Smiles appear to be a good indicator of social adeptness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis study has way too many variables in it to seem worthy. People think about their smiles before their photographs are taken. This study is basically saying that people who look happier will be happier later. I think this research is a waste of time, energy, and money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought the point of the results was that genuine overall happiness appears to be linked to bright, presumably genuine smiles exhibited in early life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs Hertenstein's saying that the entire study might be invalid because they may all just be concealing unhappiness, both then and now?
A cheerful, spontaneous smile is a good prognosticator of a cheerful personality, a proverbial no-brainer. Also, most people find it's a real pain to be around unhappy people, or even someone who seems unhappy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow much money was paid for this "study" to determine the obvious??
Complaining about confirming the "obvious." Well, "obviously" the sun moves around the earth. Until proven, it's all assumption and assumptions can be wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is troubling is the variables--what did "marriage" mean (did it include committed gay couples or committed nonmarried straight couples)? What makes marriage such a barometer of happiness? Or even of submerged unhappiness? And what is a "genuine" smile vs a canned one? It seems to me there's much subjectivity to this research.
We should do a study on the average troll commenter to see how much they smile. to all of the people before me, why do you find in necessary to poo-poo every article?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Obviously" they are anal-compulsive. Zing!! :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy exact thoughts. It was likely funded by the NIH, which far eclipse the NSF funding. What a joke.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEverybody needs something to do.
I think that the outcome of the research is not sound enough to make me to treat it as the natural situation! If as the research points out, all of us have the ability to smile frequently, no matter whether we are truely happy or not. And another reason is that ,compared with the about six billion people on the earth, the sample number is so small to prove the truth of the research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, I wonder about the cultural factors involved in the expression of "smiling"- such as stoicism in asian cultures. One look at a majority of pictures from a yearbook of asians have repressed smiles, mostly from the psychological effects of the repression of emotion in asian cultures; however, the divorce rate in japan is much lower than the US.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThough this thought may be countered by the cultural factors regarding divorces.
haha, just a thought.
If only women in certain area were taken into account, the results will not be able to be applied to a wider range.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nature question will be what if a happy looking man married an unhappy looking woman and vise versa?
If only women in certain area were taken into account, the results will not be able to be applied to a wider range.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nature question will be what if a happy looking man married an unhappy looking woman and vise versa?
i think the research are lack of convenient,the researcher should put more study on the subject
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi think this research is lack of convince,there should be more study on it to prove the conclusion
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost of the children are naive and natural. Their smile are less social smiling than adult's.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince children are more naive and natural than adult, their smile are less social than adults'. Maybe, without the mask of social smile, child's smile can reveal their innermost feeling and emotional disposition.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe underlying theory here is that "happiness" is something of an attribute of a person, and has staying power in the same way the certain kinds of intelligence do. If you test in the higher ranges early in life, you are also likely to test in the higher ranges later in life for such traits. Of course there are exceptions and reversals, etc. but on average, this is the expectation. However, even if we could sharply define "happiness", we cannot (at this time anyway) directly measure it, particularly retrospectively (the past history of the people who were in the study). Photographs of childhood smiling were simply used as a poor proxy to try to know something about happiness levels when younger. We don't know to what extent they were able to get representative photos, but apparently what they were able to get at least correlated with later measures (also poor proxies) of whatever happiness is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs others have pointed out, this is all pretty fuzzy stuff, and also matches simple common-sense intuition. But it is not unthinkable that the opposite hypothesis could be true, i.e. that those who seem to be happier later in life were, when we checked on it, not very happy when they were young. Some think that being unhappy early might help one to be happier later. Or that being happy when young might lead to too much disillusionment later in life. I think it is worthwhile to attempt to form the hypothesis and attempt to test it. While all of us might have wished for better definitions and better proxies (I'm sure the researches also wished for at least the latter), let's not underestimate the difficulty of doing long-term longitudinal studies on fuzzy attributes. It requires lots of time, effort and patience.
I've always been self conscious about my maxillary diastema and developed a closed mouth smile which at best probably wouldn't be judged as a genuine smile. However, I've been happily married for 43 years. Now I've got to wonder if because of my weak smile, divorce is around the corner.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmmmm. This suggests that Americans will be sending their kids to smiling trainers for regular workouts before the family/class picture in order to gain higher marital stability in later life? Or is this stating the bloody obvious: Happy kids often grow up to be happy adults.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease excuse my sardonic smile
I learned long ago--check out a girl's family and particularly her relationship with her father before you marry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think photographs can correctly predict whether people will have successful marriages or not. During my senior photograph shoot, I was nervous and so I didn't smile as brightly as I do from a day-to-day basis. I think studying daily smiling patterns can produce better results than a picture from one point in time. Most people smile in photographs because it is the socially accepted thing to do, but back in the Victorian times, having a neutral facial expression was socially accepted. I think a picture is just too unstable to make such a broad judgement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I was to further research this article what way could I word future internet searches?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr perhaps a study to CONFIRM the obvious?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi love this site!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this