A new study has found that players in the 1950s who genuinely beamed in their official photographs tended to outlive more sullen-looking sportsmen and those who put on fake smiles, the New Scientist reported.
Players from the US major league with honest grins lived an average of seven years longer than players who didn’t smile for the camera and five years longer than players who smiled unconvincingly, said lead scientist Ernest Abel of the Wayne State University in Michigan. It’s known that happy people tend to be healthy too. The scientists wondered whether this relationship would be reflected in the smiles and longevity of baseball players.
Genuine smiles are known as Duchenne smiles after the 19th-century neurologist who defined them in detail. They engage muscles both near the corners of the mouth and around the eyes — the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi respectively. Fake smiles exercise only mouth muscles. With training, these muscles are easy to recognise in photographs. So Abel and four colleagues who were not aware of what the study was investigating, but were trained to analyse smiles, looked at vintage photographs of 230 major leaguers who played in the 1952 season.
The scientists classified them as non-smilers, Duchenne smilers or non-Duchenne smilers. Then they looked up the lifespan of the 184 players who had already died. They found that out of the dead players, Duchenne smilers had tended to live the longest, followed by non-Duchenne smilers. And after accounting for other factors that tend to predispose people to longevity, such as a university education and good health, they found an even firmer link between strength of smile and length of life. People who didn’t smile had just a 50 per cent chance of surviving to 80, whereas those with Duchenne smiles had about a 70 per cent chance of surviving to this age.