Find out how to smile to look younger, live longer, look prettier, and stamp out stress.
1. Your smile can predict the length of your life.
Here’s a good reason to get happy: A 2010 study of photographs of 150 Major League Baseball players from the 1952 season correlated the strength of their smile with the length of their life. Those who were deemed to have Duchenne (genuine, full-faced) smiles lived on average for 80 years. Those with only partial smiles lived until about age 75. And those who were missing a grin only made it to age 72. Of course the smile itself doesn’t cause longevity, Psychology Today notes, but they are likely indicative of how these men lived their lives.
2. Will you get divorced? Your yearbook photo may hold a clue.
Forget premarital counseling: Why not check out your would-be spouse’s yearbook photos before you tie the knot? After DePauw University researchers analyzed the grins of hundreds of graduates in multiple years of yearbook photos, they found that the top 10 percent of smilers had a divorce rate of about one in 20. Those in the bottom 10 percent, however, were five times as likely to get divorced. “Smilers tend to be happier, more social, and more emotionally stable, all traits that lead to successful relationships,” according to Psychology Today. Further, “smiling makes others smile, leading to mutually contagious and beneficial social arrangements.”
3. Smiling may make you look younger.
Recent Dutch research on 481 participants, who made various faces expressing different emotions, found that both computer software and other people guessed that smiling people were younger than they actually were, but only for those over age 40. Those younger than 40 looked younger when they wore more neutral expressions, according to ScienceDaily.
4. Smiling makes you more attractive—if you’re a woman.
Bad boys do get the girls, according to a 2011 study published in the journal Emotion. The researchers found that women rated men who were smiling in photographs as less attractive than those who bore more stoic faces. On the other hand, men found smiling women far more attractive than those making other expressions.
5. Smiles make you blow more cash.
Beware the smiley face on your restaurant check: it may make you drop a bigger tip—if your server is female, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. (The tactic backfired for male servers, possibly because the act was perceived as gender inappropriate).
In other research from Central Washington University, participants were more likely to buy (and pay higher prices for) products in ads where the people had genuine Duchenne smiles compared with ads where people had less full, “fake” smiles.
6. Even forcing a smile can stamp out stress.
Yes, it pays to fake it ‘til you make it, according to a recent University of Kansas study that found smiling during a taxing task helped make the deed less stressful. While genuine smiles reduced stress the most, even fake smiles (simulated by making participants holding chopsticks in their mouths) were better than no smiles, found HealthDay News.
On the flip side, suppressing the ability to frown may boost your mood. In one study, researchers injected Botox in the frowning muscles of patients with depression, rendering them unable to make sad faces. After six weeks, 27 percent of those patients went into remission from their depression compared with 7 percent in a control group who received placebo injections, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Read more: http://www.rd.com/slideshows/how-to-smile-for-better-health/#ixzz2YRNLzyTE