The hidden power of smiling Ron Gutman
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[Applause]
when I was a child I always wanted to be
a superhero I wanted to save the world
and make everyone happy but I knew that
that need superpowers to make my dreams
come true science to embark on these
imaginary journeys to find intergalactic
objects from planet Krypton which was a
lot of fun but didn’t yield much result
when I grew up and realized that science
fiction was not a good source for
superpowers 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 Berkeley 30 year
longitudinal study that examined the
photos of student in an old yearbook and
tried to measure their success and
well-being throughout their life by
measuring their students smiles
researchers were able to predict how
fulfilling and long-lasting a subject
marriage will be how else you would
score in 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
his superpowers came from his super
color but 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 live an average
of only 72 point nine years where
players with beaming smile lived an
average of almost 80 years the good news
is that we’re actually born smiling
using 3d ultrasound technology we can
now see the developing babies appeared
to smile even in the womb when they’re
born babies continue to smile initially
mostly in their sleep and even blind
babies smile to the sound of the human
voice smiling is one of the most basic
bye
logically uniform expressions of all
humans in studies he conducted in Papua
New Guinea Paul Ekman the world most
renowned researcher on facial
expressions found that even members of
the furry tribe who were completely
disconnected from Western culture and
also known for their unusual cannibalism
rituals attributed smile to descriptions
of situation the same way you and I
would so from Papua New Guinea to
Hollywood on the way to Modern Art in
Beijing we smile often and you smile to
express joy and satisfaction how many
people here in this room smile more than
20 times per day raise your hand if you
do oh wow outside of this room more than
a third of us smile more than 20 times
per day whereas less than 14% 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
having ever wonder why being around
children who smile so frequently makes
you smile very often a recent study at
Uppsala University in Sweden found that
it’s very difficult to frown when
looking at someone who smiles you ask
why because smiling is evolutionary
contagious and it suppresses the control
we usually have on our facial muscles
mimicking a smile and experiencing it
physically helped us understand whether
a smile is fake or real so we can
understand the emotional state of the
smiler
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 smiling muscles without
a pencil subjects were excellent judges
but with a pencil in their mouth when
they could not mimic the smile they saw
their judgment was impaired in addition
to terrorizing on evolution in the
Origin of Species Charles Darwin also
wrote the facial feedback response
theory
his theory states that the act of
smiling itself actually makes us feel
better but in smiling being merely a
result of feeling good in his study
Darwin actually started the French
neurologist Julien Duchenne who used
electric jolts to facial muscles to
induce and stimulate smiles please don’t
try this at home
in a related German study researchers
used fMRI imaging to measure brain
activity before and after injecting
Botox to suppress smiling muscles the
findings supported Darwin’s theory but
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 how 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
wait the same study found the smiling is
as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000
pounds turning in cash that’s like 25
grand a smile it’s not bad and think
about it this way twenty five thousand
times four hundred quite a few kids out
there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every
day
and unlike lots of chocolate lots of
smiling can actually make you healthier
smiling can help reduce the level of
stress enhancing hormones like cortisol
and adrenaline and dopamine increased
the level of mood enhancing hormones
like endorphin and reduce overall blood
pressure and if that’s not enough
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 likeable and courteous
but you actually appear to be more
competent so whenever you wanna look
great and competent reduce your stress
or improve your marriage or feel as if
you just had a whole stack of
high-quality chocolate without incurring
the caloric cost whereas if you found 25
grand 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
you
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