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October
17, 2002:
Smiles II
Interview
with Dr. Marianne LaFrance, Professor of Psychology at Yale
University
Mike
Carruthers:
When it comes to smiling, there are some pretty interesting gender
differences.
Dr.
Marianne LaFrance:
Well, the gender stuff is fascinating, in part because the
gender difference itself changes over the course of a lifespan.
Dr. Marianne
LaFrance, professor of psychology at Yale
University and consultant to the Dasani
water company.
Gender
differences are at their maximum when people are between the
ages of, say, late adolescence and early adult years. That's
when men are much less likely to smile than women. In fact,
little boys stop smiling about age 5 and little girls smile
even more after age 5. Little boys get the message that to be
a real guy, you should look self-contained and under control
and John Wayne-ish.
Whereas
little girls get the message…
…to look
sweet as can be, and one of the ways to communicate sweetness
and light is to smile.
It appears
that how much you smile does affect your life.
There's
a very interesting study done very recently where they looked
at college yearbooks of women from the 50s and managed to follow
those folks. Women who were smiling in their college yearbooks
had higher life satisfaction, lower divorce rate, basically
happier people forty years later than women who were not smiling
in their college yearbooks.
For transcripts
and our newsletter, visit our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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