

Smiles Predict Marriage Success - mshafrir
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090414/sc_livescience/smilespredictmarriagesuccess

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ryanwaggoner
Hypothesis: people who smile in yearbook photos are not really happy, just
concerned with appearances, and thus likely to stay in a joyless marriage for
appearance's sake.

I'm only half joking :)

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antidaily
My wife didn't smile in hers because she had just recently chipped a tooth and
had to have her braces put back in. Not sure what that proves.

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yummyfajitas
It proves that they didn't discover a rule, but merely a trend.

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mcslee
I'm surprised the general response here is so negative. Besides the fact that
it's obvious, research does in fact confirm that happier people smile more.
And the average high school student is probably not focused on being cynical
and grumpy whilst having his/her picture taken (though perhaps cultural norms
around pictures have changed over the past decades).

Anyways, couple the happiness-smiling connection with a few other facts about
human psychology, and this makes a lot of sense. (1) Emotional states in
humans are contagious. We naturally tend to empathize with one and other,
laugh together, and cry together. (2) We also naturally tend to mimic physical
gestures made by people we are interacting with, often subconsciously. (3)
Facial expressions actually influence our emotional state. Being happy makes
us smile, but also _smiling actually makes us happier._

It doesn't seem much of a leap from there that happiness would correlate
inversely with divorce. In my take, this article is just reaffirming that
naturally happy people are less likely to divorce.

Here's another interesting article about the contagiousness of happiness:
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9784878...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97848789)

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rjurney
If you're happy enough to have a genuine smile while attending an American
highschool, then putting up with someone's shit for 50 year's is NOTHING :)

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tokenadult
Here is pg's take on how to deal with high school:

<http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

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dhimes
I just read that--it's one of the best I've read by pg.

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fauigerzigerk
They define marriage success as not divorcing. That works only if you define
marriage as a formal pact devoid of any emotional substance.

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nostrademons
This seems really susceptible to noise. It makes perfect sense that people who
smile a lot tend to have a happier disposition, which makes them easier to get
along with, which makes them more likely to stay married. However, plenty of
people are unhappy in school for reasons that have nothing to do with having a
genetically cheery personality. It could be, oh, the getting beat up, and
being forced to do mindless work, and listening to teachers who are dumber
than you, and waking up at godawful hours.

People often change _a lot_ when they go off to college and start working. I
was just having dinner with a coworker who's one of the most talkative people
I know. Apparently, she _never_ talked for the first 18 years of her life, and
only rarely for the next 4. Happiness may have a strong genetic component, but
that's not saying that the environment doesn't matter _at all_.

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Dilpil
So... the top 10 percent had 0% divorce rate, the bottom 10 percent had 25%
divorce rate.

Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%? Something fishy is happening here.

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tokenadult
_Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%?_

No, that is a statistical fallacy.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?pagewan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?pagewanted=print&position=)

~~~
d0mine
_"About half is still a very sensible statement"_ </quote> from the article
you cited

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ryanwaggoner
Who paid for this?

"We need some money to fund a research project to look at people's amount of
'smiley-ness' in their old yearbook photos and see if it corresponds to
whether they get divorced later in life."

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tokenadult
You don't think there is huge social significance in preventing divorce? Some
very smart young people I know can't attend great colleges that have admitted
them, because their parents are divorced and not in agreement about paying
their college expenses. Loss of human talent hurts all of us.

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ryanwaggoner
I think there's incredible value in preventing divorce. I also think this
study is bullshit.

I know this is a bit of a strawman, but what have we really learned here? That
if you tell your kids to smile in their yearbook photo, they'll have a happy
marriage? Sorry, I just don't see any value in this correlation at all...seems
like it's almost as likely to be random as meaningful.

Edit: Instead of just downvoting me, could someone explain what I'm missing?

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tokenadult
I'll upvote you as much as I can, and explain why I think the study is worth
doing. Just like Alexander Fleming when he first saw a zone in a culture dish
where bacteria wouldn't grow,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming#Accidental_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming#Accidental_discovery)

a scientist who notices an interesting correlation has some new issue to
investigate. The next issue to investigate is why some young people smile for
their yearbook photos and some do not. Yet another issue to investigate is
whether that characteristic is malleable in each individual. And of course all
the causation issues need to be sorted out--do people stay with spouses who
smile a lot, even if the spouses are louts, while good spouses who are glum
get dumped? There is a lot to investigate here, but the investigation could
reduce an important problem. At the very least, a marriage counselor
prioritizing which client to devote the most vigorous interventions to might
start asking clients to bring in their high school yearbooks and talk about
how they felt about having their pictures taken, to get them talking about
other issues.

But, yes, I agree that one of the first things to be done here is to attempt
to replicate the finding.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Maybe it is just coincidence in this one study, and the correlation is
spurious. But it would be a reasonable idea to check.

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teej
Smiles _Correlate With_ Marriage Success

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dreish
Yes, it's entirely possible that the divorce flowed backward through time and
wiped the smiles off the future divorcees faces while they were posing for
yearbook photos.

Thank you for the knee-jerk causation/correlation comment.

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frossie
I think the person who complained about the correlation/causation comment was
right, whether it was knee-jerk or not. You don't need time travel to see what
the problem could be.

Say a typical person may or may not be the smiley type, and say that means
nothing at all about their chance of marital bliss. But say oh, I don't know,
all migraine sufferers frown, because they are in pain. And say that being a
migraine sufferer puts a terrible strain on your marriage (look, it's just an
example) and so you are more likely to divorce. Now if you look for the
divorce rate of people who frown, it will be much higher than that of people
who smile. But that has no predictive value for an individual who frowns,
because (in this hypothetical example) it's not the frown that is the issue -
it is whether they get migrains. If there is no predictive value, there is no
real science.

The other fundamental problem with presenting research in this way is that it
is very easy to pick two percentile ranges and find a difference even in
random data. The question that one should ask is - was there a _dose
response_. In other words, if you plotted divorce rate along this so called
"smile strength" axis, would there be a linear correlation (the weaker the
smile the higher the divorce rate)? Or is your conclusion based on the
outliers?

I can't tell from the OP.

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banned_man
I absolutely hate smiling for photos. It feels fake. I don't really like
having my picture taken, to be completely honest, even though I'm not bad
looking.

I really hope this study is as meaningless as I suspect it to be.

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nkurz
I feel the same way you do about photos, but I fear that the study isn't quite
as meaningless as you suspect. It's seems quite plausible that unwillingness
to conform to social norms by faking a smile correlates to (lack of) success
in marriage.

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ilkhd2
In general I agree with what has been said. But, there are also cultural
issues involved here. Some cultures smile more some less. Canadians for
example smile a bit less than Americans, but I believe have less divorces.
Also some horribly stupid smiles have to be filtered out. Some other thoughts:
Recall some crazy sadistic couples, who mutilated people, killed for no reason
etc. - it looks like the have pretty strong marriages,but I doubt they smile a
lot.

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vaksel
sounds like a load of bull.

