Written by Jason Shields
When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world and then make everyone happy and I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. i grew up on a farm where there were a multitude of places to explore and use as the backdrop to my imaginary missions. I would find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton and Solaris, a planet I cooked up on my own, which was a lot of fun, but didn't get me many results. Having a disability, I thought it was my mission to spread love and acceptance to the whole world. I believed that somewhere, there existed a magical talisman that when activated, would make everyone happy an at peace with each other. When I grew up, I still continued to hold on to those childhood dreams and realized that science-fiction was not too far off the mark. However, I still needed a true source that I could tap to discover my inborn “superpowers,” and I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth.
I started my journey in California with a UC Berkley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring these students’ smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be, how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that these superpowers came from his “super collar”. Now I know it was all in his smile.
Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. The researchers found that the span of a player’s smile could actually predict the span of his life. Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years, almost a 10% increase.
The most interesting news that I’ve discovered in all of this research is that we're actually born smiling. Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, in the womb! After they are born, babies continue to smile, mostly in their sleep. Even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically-uniform expressions of all humans.
In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals, attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often. A smile expresses joy and satisfaction.
How many of you readers smile more than 20 times per day? Recent statistics on research indicate that more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children who smile as many as 400 times per day. As a child from birth till about 12 years of age, I was known for my smile and large dimples. The adults, with who I spent the majority of the time, always commented on my smile. In fact, I was known for my smile. Jason Shields and the word “smile” were synonymous.
Have you ever wondered why being around children who smile so frequently makes you smile? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it is very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask, why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically can help us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the person who is smiling at us.
In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress their smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges. When the pencil was placed in their mouth, when they could not mimic the smile they saw and their judgment was impaired.
In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species", Charles Darwin also discovered the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better, rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who used electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don't try this at home.
Duchenne also observed that there seem to be at least two distinct patterns of facial muscle movement which we happen to group together with the same word. One involves bot h the muscle which parts and raises the lips (zygomatic major), and the muscle which raises the cheeks and gathers the skin inward toward the eye socket (orbicularis oculi). He identified this as the smile of spontaneous joy. The other involves only the zygomatic major muscle around the mouth. In acknowledgment of Duchenne’s insight, University of California researcher Paul Ekman has dubbed the smile of spontaneous happiness a Duchenne smile, while the other is sometimes called a false, social, or masking smile.
In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. The finding supported Darwin's theory by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate, a well-regarded pleasure inducer, cannot match.
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate. The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 25,000 in cash, 25 grand a smile. It's not bad. Think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Bill Gates every day.
And, unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the levels of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphin and reduce overall blood pressure. And if that's not enough, smiling can actually 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.
So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality dark chocolate, without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you had just found $25,000 in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile.
No comments:
Post a Comment