My list of Key Ideas from Ron Gutman's talk:.
1. Studies that were based on a person's smile in a picture were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage will be, how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. Also span of life.
2. Children smile as many as 400 times per day.
3. Smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically help us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.
4. Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory that states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better -- rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good.
5 Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphin and reduce overall blood pressure.
6. Smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others. A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.
--> Can you tell a Real Smile from a Fake Smile?
Spot The Fake Smile
- This experiment is designed to test whether you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one
- It has 20 questions and should take you 10 minutes
- It is based on research by Professor Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California
- Each video clip will take approximately 15 seconds to load on a 56k modem and you can only play each smile once
Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling.
Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain.
Fake smiles can be performed at will, because the brain signals that create them come from the conscious part of the brain and prompt the zygomaticus major muscles to contract.
Genuine smiles, on the other hand, are generated by the unconscious brain, so are automatic. When people feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of the brain that processes emotion.
Scientists distinguish between genuine and fake smiles by using a coding system called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was devised by Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California and Dr Wallace V. Friesen of the University of Kentucky.
