The Authentic – Duchenne Smile, Positive Psychology and Success

The Authentic – Duchenne Smile, Positive Psychology and Success

 

Positive Psychology has studied how important Positive Emotions are and how different the outlook is for people who smile. These are three tests that are mind boggling:

 

·         Some researchers now believe that genuine smiles are clear windows

·         into a person’s core disposition.

·         University of California at Berkeley psychological scientists

·         LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner analyzed the college yearbook photos of women,

·         then matched up the smile ratings with personality data collected

·         during a 30-year longitudinal study.

·         Women who displayed true, Duchenne-worthy expressions of positive emotion

·         in their 21-year-old photo had

·         greater levels of general well-being and marital satisfaction at age 52.

·         “People photograph each other with casual ease and remarkable frequency,

·         usually unaware that each snapshot may capture as much about the future

·         as it does the passing emotions of the moment,”

 

·         A related study, published in a 2009 issue of Motivation and Emotion,

·         confirmed a correlation between low-intensity smiles in youth and divorce later in life.

 

·         In a more recent study, published in Psychological Science,

·         Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger of Wayne State University

·         extended this line of research from emotional outcomes to a biological one: longevity.

·         Abel and Kruger rated the smiles of professional baseball players captured in a 1952

·         yearbook, then determined each player’s age at death

·         (46 players were still alive at the time of the study).

·         The researchers found that smile intensity could explain 35 percent of the variability

·         in survival; in fact, in any given year,

·         players with Duchenne smiles in their yearbook photo were

·         only half as likely to die as those who had not.