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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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.
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.
Angie LeVan is a resilience coach, positive psychology consultant and an associate of Positive Psychology Services, LLC. Angie has studied the science of well-being in the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at University of Pennsylvania, and she is a blogger on the topic of resilience for psychologytoday.com. See her profile in our practitioner directory.
Despite the great case for getting off our duffs, there are some amazingly cool and effective practices we can do from the comfort of our own recliners – without even budging a finger. For instance, you could practice your golf swing, work out your muscles, prepare to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, hone your chess skills, practice for tomorrow’s surgery, and you can even prepare for your best life!
Mental practice can get you closer to where you want to be in life, and it can prepare you for success! For instance, Natan Sharansky, a computer specialist who spent 9 years in prison in the USSR after being accused of spying for US has a lot of experience with mental practices. While in solitary confinement, he played himself in mental chess, saying: “I might as well use the opportunity to become the world champion!” Remarkably, in 1996, Sharansky beat world champion chess player Garry Kasparov!
A study looking at brain patterns in weightlifters found that the patterns activated when a weightlifter lifted hundreds of pounds were similarly activated when they only imagined lifting. In some cases, research has revealed that mental practices are almost effective as true physical practice, and that doing both is more effective than either alone. For instance, in his study on everyday people, Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist from Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, compared “people who went to the gym with people who carried out virtual workouts in their heads”. He found that a 30% muscle increase in the group who went to the gym. However, the group of participants who conducted mental exercises of the weight training increased muscle strength by almost half as much (13.5%). This average remained for 3 months following the mental training.
Noted as one form of mental rehearsal, visualization has been popular since the Soviets started using it back in the 1970s to compete in sports. Now, many athletes employ this technique, including Tiger Woods who has been using it since his pre-teen years. Seasoned athletes use vivid, highly detailed internal images and run-throughs of the entire performance, engaging all their senses in their mental rehearsal, and they combine their knowledge of the sports venue with mental rehearsal. World Champion Golfer, Jack Nicklaus has said: “I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp in-focus picture of it in my head”. Even heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali, used different mental practices to enhance his performance in the ring such as: “affirmation; visualization; mental rehearsal; self-confirmation; and perhaps the most powerful epigram of personal worth ever uttered: “I am the greatest””.
Brain studies now reveal that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as actions. Mental imagery impacts many cognitive processes in the brain: motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory. So the brain is getting trained for actual performance during visualization. It’s been found that mental practices can enhance motivation, increase confidence and self-efficacy, improve motor performance, prime your brain for success, and increase states of flow – all relevant to achieving your best life!
For someone like Matthew Nagle who is paralyzed in all four limbs, mental practices have transformed his entire way of life. Matthew had a silicone chip implanted in brain. Astonishingly, after just 4 days of mental practice, he could: move a computer cursor on a screen, open email, play a computer game, and control robotic arm. While our circumstances may be less stringent than Matthew’s, it’s quite obvious that every person can benefit from mental practices.
So, if athletes and chess players use this technique to enhance performance, how can it enhance the lives of the ‘average joe’? First, study results highlight the strength of the mind-body connection, or in other words the link between thoughts and behaviors – a very important connection for achieving your best life. While your future may not include achieving a great physique or becoming the heavy-weight champ or winning the Masters Tournament, mental practice has a lot to offer you. Try it here!
Begin by establishing a highly specific goal. Imagine the future; you have already achieved your goal. Hold a metal ‘picture’ of it as if it were occurring to you right at that moment. Imagine the scene in as much detail as possible. Engage as many of the five senses as you can in your visualization. Who are you with? Which emotions are you feeling right now? What are you wearing? Is there a smell in the air? What do you hear? What is your environment? Sit with a straight spine when you do this. Practice at night or in the morning (just before/after sleep). Eliminate any doubts, if they come to you. Repeat this practice often. Combine with meditation or an affirmation (e.g. “I am courageous; I am strong”, or to borrow from Ali, “I am the greatest!”).
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.
Dr. Acacia Parks-Sheiner is an instructor in positive psychology, a researcher and a member of the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. Dr. Parks has taught a variety of classes on how to use positive psychology interventions, and she often gets questions from students and clients about what will work best for them.
The happiness-health relationship isn’t magic – although some parts of it may be biological, a big part of why happy people are healthier stems from behaviors that come more easily to happy people. A study by Bob Emmons and colleagues found that people who experience gratitude on a regular basis are more likely to spontaneously exercise, and they also get better sleep. These short-term health behaviors lead to long-term benefits like longer life span. So if getting happier doesn’t seem worth the effort by itself, think abut the health benefits!
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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.
