
A life lesson from the majors: Smile, you'll live longer - robg
http://www.boston.com/sports/graphics/Life_Lessons_from_the_majors/
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davi
My knee-jerk reaction to this is, "Another useless confusion of correlation
and causation! Stupid media! Stupid HN!"

But...

A family friend had a stroke. It affected his gate and speech. He found that
if he smiled broadly, both his gate and speech became more fluid. This
suggests that the _act_ of smiling can change function of the rest of the
nervous system.

So who knows?

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tmsh
As others mention, another potentially incorrect causation/correlation
confusion. Smiling for you baseball photo is not necessarily indicative of
smiling in general. Perhaps. But it's quite possible that the players who
smiled for their photo were already well-established, could afford to seem
less professional, etc. And if they were more successful by the time of that
photo, then perhaps their careers on average were more successful, and hence
they had easier, more-stress free and perhaps longer lives.

Or to continue the success-at-time-of-photo idea, maybe they smiled because
the photographer smiled at them more, because the photographer was more
familiar with them. Could by any number of reasons that the two things were
correlated, all of which wouldn't necessarily imply that if you, reader, smile
more, then you, reader, will live longer.

Though that's probably true. But yeah, easy to forget that a smile itself is
very much an effect of something else. Concluding that if you 'smile more',
something good will happen is sort of a false optimization. Smarter to figure
out what you should be smiling about. And if you're not, be in search of why.

P.S. In other news, the New York Giants? Really? There's more concrete
psychology in that Freudian slip. And then you look at who they chose for the
info graphic. The Brooklin Dodgers? Nice try, Boston.

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louislouis
I've been using a mood hack recently which has been working great for me. It
might work for you too but no gurantees as everyone is different. So the hack
goes like this. Whenever you're feeling down or not particularly cheerful,
force your face into a smile, a really big one and hold it for 30 seconds.
Really tense up your facial muscles like you're flexing your bicep, but on
your face. Empty your mind of all negative thoughts. At some point during the
30 second hold, you'll feel a little happier. The muscles will trigger a
release of neurotransmitters like serotonin and other happy chemicals.

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edw519
OP forgot a few variables...

Roy Campanella spent most of his life in a wheelchair after a horrible car
accident.

Mickey Mantle drank more alcohol than many small countries.

Do you think these things just might have a little more impact on longevity
than smiling?

~~~
sliverstorm
Hence the reason you try to take a large sample size (230 photos), to control
for effects like that. Those players are just examples.

Besides, Mantle drowning himself in alcohol typically = unhappy. As they did
not explicitly say SMILING MAKES YOU LIVE LONGER, but that players who tended
to smile tended to live longer, that still fits the results. The unhappy guy
is killing himself, and it shows up in his facial expression.

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merraksh
_Classify the players' smiles, from none to light-up-the-locker-room. Then see
how long the players lived._

I haven't read the research article, and I agree that smiling doesn't hurt,
but this post surely doesn't make it sound very scientific. I wouldn't drop
the "Correlation is not causation" bomb, but they seem to have missed it.

