Contrary to popular belief, smiling makes you look older

By Christian Jarrett
In the adverts for anti-ageing skin products, everyone is smiling, positively blooming with youthfulness. A canny move by the marketeers you might think – after all, past research has found most of us believe smiling makes people look younger. It’s just that actually, it doesn’t. It makes you look older. That’s according to a new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review that explores an intriguing mismatch between our beliefs and perceptions.

Tzvi Ganel at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Melvyn Goodale at the University of Western Ontario began by asking 40 participants (23 women; average age 24) to estimate the age of 35 women and 35 men from photographs of their faces. Participants saw one of two versions of each model’s face, in which they were either smiling or had a neutral expression. On average, the participants rated the faces as older, by about a year, when they saw them smiling compared with when they had a neutral expression.
Despite this, most of the participants (33/40) stated afterwards that they believed smiling makes you look younger. Also, when asked to estimate the average age they’d given for all of the smiling faces they’d viewed and the average age they’d given to the neutral faces, they thought erroneously that they’d rated the smiling faces as younger (presumably in keeping with their belief that smiling makes you look younger).
These new results are consistent with an earli...

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - April 27, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Emotion Faces Perception Source Type: blogs