The December 13th New York Times Magazines features this piece by Jeff Stryker
Say cheese and stay married? Yes, according to Matthew Hertenstein, a psychology professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. He and three colleagues recruited more than 600 people for a review of their college yearbook photos. The researchers rated the yearbook smiles by coding muscle movements around the mouth and the eyes.
The researchers found a surprising correlation: the less people smiled, the more likely they were to later divorce. The effect was statistically significant, though not huge. But when Hertenstein compared the top 10 percent of brightest smilers with the bottom 10 percent of weakest smilers, the “lowest were five times more likely to be divorced than the top.”
The researchers also recruited 51 people to submit photos of their choosing. The relationship between smiling and staying married held even for the photographs this group submitted — posed and candid shots from when the subjects were, on average, 10 years old. “I’m more confident in the smiling effect because it held even with a) childhood and b) candid photos,” Hertenstein says. Studying smiles in photos is only the latest in what has come to be called “thin slice” research, popularized in the book “Blink,” a couple of best sellers ago from Malcolm Gladwell. For example, from very short video clips, research volunteers have determined with surprising accuracy the personality, socioeconomic status and sexual orientation of those on camera. A still photograph is merely an extremely wafer-thin slice.
The why of the smiling effect remains elusive. Hertenstein acknowledges potentially “dozens” of possible explanations, going with perhaps the most straightforward and benign. He says his “gut inclination is that people who smile on average in their photos have a positive disposition that serves them well in life and relationships.”
He cautions that his study is “not destiny.” Readers who frowned in their yearbook photos are not putting off the inevitable if they fail to rush to court to file for divorce. “There are plenty of people who defy the odds,” offers the professor, only slightly reassuringly.
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Several years ago, I began to pursue a Master’s degree online. Up until this point, all of my formal education had come as a result of being in a classroom, reading books, taking tests, and writing papers. Now, I would have no contact with other people. I would learn from reading books and articles in PDF format. Lectures were posted in the electronic classroom and responses were required to be a minimum of three sentences long with at least one citation. It was a difficult transition to this new form of learning but one day, I discovered something that made it a lot more enjoyable and effective: I talked to friends and family about my experiences. I told them about what I was learning, how I hoped to use it in my professional life, what I disagreed with, and how others might benefit from this content.
And, I believe, so it goes with your efforts to increase your happiness and resilience. I don’t believe it’s absolutely necessary to share your intimate thoughts or beliefs with others. But, sharing can help boost your efforts and help others in the process. Just try the following tips the next time you do Three Good Things or What Door Opened (or any exercise or test, for that matter):
- Teach: Take a minute to teach the other person the step-by-step process involved with the exercise or test. Help her understand why the exercise works and how it might benefit her. Offer some suggestions for making it a part of her routine or even some variations on how to keep it interesting on a regular basis.
- Tell: Share your experiences doing the exercise or what you learned from a particular test. Tell your friend or family member why you continue to use the tools and what you specifically learned from them.
- Do: This one’s pretty simple…continue to do the exercises and take the tests on a regular basis. Pick 2-4 four exercises that you can do frequently and make it a ritual. And, select a test to complete once a week or every couple of weeks to gauge your progress.
If you’re like me, increasing your happiness and resilience actually takes a bit of work. But if you can transform your efforts into a ritual and follow the Teach, Tell, Do philosophy, it can be quite engaging and enjoyable.
By happier.com expert Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.
I lied. Studying the ins and outs of hotel maids provide absolutely no insight into cancer.
Besides lying to you, I have no idea what the politically correct term is for women who clean hotel rooms. Maid? chambermaid? housekeeper? female room attendant? If I offend anyone, my apologies for failing to master the appropriate terminology. But everything else is true and rather inoffensive. In this brief post, you will learn a single secret to physical fitness and mental health that might translate into longer, better living.
Hotel maids are notorious for waking up at ridiculously early hours to start working. They also are confronted with unwanted flesh at surprising intervals and in surprising situations. There’s the man who refuses to make a peep while sitting on the toilet until spotted. There’s the man who opens the front door with swinging genitalia lacking a single synaptic connection to the idea of covering up. There’s the guest’s drunken friend who rests peacefully face to the ground, ass in the air, burrowed behind the curtains. I’m not being sexist. 97 out of 100 encounters, the naked being will be male. But I digress.
Hotel maids are stressed out and thus, have little time for a formal workout. If you don’t believe me, go ask a hotel maid how often they go the gym or jog in the park. They certainly do enough bending, lifting, climbing, and moving to burn off calories. Which begs the question- what if maids were made mindfully aware and open to the idea that a fitness routine is embedded into their job? Could changing their mindset lead to actual changes in their physical and mental health? A few researchers sought to find out.
As the most minimal of interventions, one group of hotel maids were informed about the importance of daily exercise and how their regimen of climbing stairs, vacuuming, cleaning linen, and scrubbing tables and tubs affects their body. They were given exact details, for example, a 140-pound women burns 50 calories after vacuuming for 15 minutes. They were told that their typical workday far exceeds the exercise recommendations of the Surgeon General. A second group of hotel maids were given the same information about the benefits of exercise but weren’t told anything about how their work effort is in fact, exercise. With this comparison group, the researchers could determine whether there was some unique benefit to being mindful about what constitutes exercise.
So what happened when these maids were tracked down a month later? After only 4 weeks of learning that work might serve as exercise, the maids lost an average of 2 pounds, lowered their blood pressure by an average of 10 points, and trimmed their body fit even though they didn’t change their diet or add any exercise to their routine. The only thing that changed was that how they attended to their physical exertion at work. That’s it! As for the comparison group, they basically remained in the same shape as when they started.
Yet another testament to how our mindset can alter our bodies. We can’t always feel good but we can almost always be profoundly aware and open to what we do. Being fully alive during these moments are the building blocks to a life well lived.
Here’s a question that we should all be asking- what do I fail to notice in my daily routine that’s important to my physical, mental, and social well-being?
And tell your hotel maid how muscular her arms are looking so she can live a long, healthy life….
Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his books and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
At happier.com, we were pleased to hear about the new workbook and study guide: Positively Speaking. We asked coach and consultant Paul Z. Jackson, the guide’s author, to explain to us the solutions-focused approach that characterizes his work.
What is solutions-focused coaching?
One of the managers I have been coaching complained that her meetings often began (and indeed continued) on a negative note. In an atmosphere of moaning and blame, she was finding it nearly impossible to shift the conversations from such ‘problem-talk’ into discussion of what was wanted and what could be done.
We decided that she would start the next meeting with a warm-up round of introductions, with each participant invited to state one thing that they were looking forward to during the day. She tried this and reported that the meeting was transformed. It turned out that her colleagues were delighted to engage in ‘solution-talk’ – they simply needed to be nudged out of their habits and into a more constructive way of working together.
This skill of shifting conversations from problem-talk to solution-talk can save you and the people around you a great deal of time, reduce stress and generate more positive collaborations. Learn more about these skills with the Positively Speaking workbook.
Paul Z Jackson is an inspirational consultant and coach, who devises and runs training courses and development programs in strategy, leadership, teamwork, creativity and innovation.
Co-director of The Solutions Focus www.thesolutionsfocus.co.uk, Paul is a popular keynote speaker and workshop presenter at conferences around the world.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
People who feel isolated may spread mistrust of social connections
Staying socially connected may be just as important for public health as washing your hands and covering your cough. A new study suggests that feelings of loneliness can spread through social networks like the common cold.
“People on the edge of the network spread their loneliness to others and then cut their ties,” says Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston, a coauthor of the new study in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “It’s like the edge of a sweater: You start pulling at it and it unravels the network.”
This study is the latest in a series that Christakis and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego have conducted to see how habits and feelings move through social networks. Their earlier studies suggested that obesity, smoking and happiness are contagious.
Credit: Cacioppo et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The new study, led by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, found that loneliness is catching as well, possibly because lonely people don’t trust their connections and foster that mistrust in others.
Loneliness appears to be easier to catch from friends than from family, to spread more among women than men, and to be most contagious among neighbors who live within a mile of each other. The study also found that loneliness can spread to three degrees of separation, as in the studies of obesity, smoking and happiness. One lonely friend makes you 40 to 65 percent more likely to be lonely, but a lonely friend-of-a-friend increases your chances of loneliness by 14 to 36 percent. A friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend adds between 6 and 26 percent, the study suggests.
Not all networks researchers are convinced. Jason Fletcher of the Yale School of Public Health says that the studies’ controls are not good enough to eliminate other explanations, like environmental influences or the tendency of similar people to befriend each other. Fletcher has published a study (in the same issue of the British Medical Journal that reported that happiness is contagious) showing that acne, headaches and height also appear to spread through networks even though they are not likely to be transmitted socially.
“We’re on the side that [social contagion] exists — we’re not naysayers,” Fletcher says. “We just think the evidence isn’t clear enough on many of the outcomes.”
Despite its shortcomings, some researchers are enthusiastic about the study.
“I think this is a groundbreaking paper in loneliness literature,” says Dan Perlman, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who specializes in loneliness. “Maybe there are people who are skeptical, but this is important work. I think that it should get a pat on the back.”
Christakis and Fowler examined data from a long-term health study based in Framingham, Mass., a small town where many of the study’s participants knew each other. The Framingham study followed thousands of people over 60 years, keeping track of physical and mental heath, habits and diet.
Each participant also named friends, relatives and neighbors who might know where they would be in two years, when it was time for the next exam. From this information, Christakis and Fowler reconstructed the social network of Framingham, including more than 12,000 ties between 5,124 people. The researchers plotted how reported loneliness, measured via a diagnostic test for depression, changed over time.
The results indicate that lonely people tend to move to the peripheries of social networks. But first, lonely people transmit their feeling of isolation to friends and neighbors.
Feeling lonely doesn’t mean you have no connections, Cacioppo says. It only means those connections aren’t satisfying enough. Loneliness can start as a sense that the world is hostile, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Loneliness causes people to be alert for social threats,” Cacioppo says. “You engage in more self-protective behavior, which is paradoxically self-defeating.” Lonely people can become standoffish and eventually withdraw from their social networks, leaving their former friends less well-connected and more likely to mistrust the world themselves.
Because loneliness is implicated in health problems from Alzheimer’s to heart disease, Cacioppo says, reconnecting to those who have fallen off the network may be vital for public health.
