4 ms·

A life lesson from the majors: Smile, you'll live longer

23 points by robg 17y ago

merraksh 17y ago
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.
edw519 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
davi 17y ago
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?
tmsh 17y ago
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.
louislouis 17y ago
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.

23 points by robg 17y ago

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.

edw519 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

davi 17y ago

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?

tmsh 17y ago

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.

louislouis 17y ago

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.