Find out how to smile to look younger, live longer, look prettier, and stamp out stress.
7. Which would you prefer: a smile or chocolate?
Smiles stimulate the brain’s rewards systems better than sweets. One British study found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 (yes, you read that right: two thousand) bars of chocolate, according to the TED talk on smiling.
8. Seeing your baby smile is a natural high.
There’s nothing like seeing your baby’s gummy grin for the first time. A Pediatrics study of 28 new moms with infants who ranged in age from 5 to 10 months viewed photos of their babies and other babies making different faces while in a functional MRI machine to measure brain activity. When they saw their own babies smiling, key areas in the brain’s “reward center” lit up—the same ones associated with drug addiction. There was less of an effect when the babies were making sad faces or when they looked at babies besides their own, according to Medical News Today.
9. Guess who smiles more—men or women?
You’ll probably guess women, and you’ll be right—but not always, according to some interesting research published in the journal Psychological Bulletin. Researchers pored over 186 studies on gender differences and smiling. They found that women do smile more than men, but not a lot more. And this difference narrowed even more when people thought no one was looking. (In other words, women smile more and men smile less when they think they are being observed, possibly due to expectations about gender roles.) The paper also found that men and women smile about the same when they have similar jobs, power, or social roles, according to ScienceDaily.
10. Smiling presidents are a new-ish trend.
It’s hard to picture President Obama without his bright, beaming smile or President George W. Bush sans his crooked grin. But until the beginning of the twentieth century, smiling leaders of the free world were a rarity, according to a Willamette University paper on the changing conceptions of the U.S. presidency. Presidents purposefully didn’t smile in public; they intended to look serious. This began to change with the Roosevelt cousins: Theodore was the first president ever photographed grinning and FDR’s infectious grin was a big topic in newspapers covering his campaign.
11. One muscle is solely responsible for a sincere smile.
What separates a real (Duchenne) smile from a fake one? A muscle called the obicularis occuli, which encircles the eye socket, according to the book Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex and Politics. According to author Marianne LaFrance, “when people genuinely smile, in a true burst of positive emotion, not only to the corners of the mouth, controlled by the zygomaticus major, but this muscle around the eye also contracts. This causes the crows feet wrinkles that fan out from the outer corners of the eyes and its also responsible for folds in the upper eyelid. Most people can’t do that deliberately.”
12. Kids are more likely to smile than adults.
How many times a day do you crack a smile? Children do it as many as 400 times a day, according to a TED talk on the power of smiling, compared with more than one-third of adults who smile more than 20 times a day and the less than 14 percent who say they smile fewer than five times a day. Children are literally born smiling: 3D ultrasound images show fetuses smiling in the womb. Newborns usually smile within a few days of giving birth, and by six weeks old, babies will smile while they look directly at their parents, according to Lip Service. By age 6, children are capable of faking a smile they don’t really feel.
13. The artist behind the famous yellow smiley face earned only $45 for it.
Advertising firm owner Harvey Ball of Worcester, Massachusetts created the Smiley Face in 1963 to boost morale among workers of two recently merged insurance companies, according to Ball’s obituary. State Mutual Life Assurance Cos. of America paid him $45 for the design. By 1971, more than 50 million Smiley Face buttons had been sold.
Read more: http://www.rd.com/slideshows/how-to-smile-for-better-health/#ixzz2YRPuXvEe