Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

LeeAnne and I then took this measure of the warmth of the smile and related it to the treasure trove of measures Ravenna had gathered on these Mills alumnae when the women returned to the Berkeley lab, often flying in from great distances, when they were twenty-seven, forty-two, and fifty-two. This included measures of their daily stress, their personalities, the health of their marriages, and their sense of meaning and well-being as they moved into middle age.

What we discovered about the benefits of the warm smile would fit the analysis of the smile developed here, and would prompt readers of the study to rustle around their closets in search of their yearbooks. Warm D smiles promote high jen ratios and the meaningful life.

Mills alumnae who showed warmer, stronger D smiles when they were twenty reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years. The smile mitigates anxiety and pain, most likely through the effects smiling has on stress-related cardiovascular arousal. The strong D smilers also reported feeling more connected to those around them; the smile helps trigger greater trust and intimacy with others.

The warmth of a woman’s smile also predicted a rising trajectory in her sense that she was achieving her goals. Women with warmer smiles for the next thirty years became more organized, mentally focused, and achievement-oriented. Forget what people have told you about creativity and achievement emerging out of despair and anxiety. Not so. Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative, expansive, generative, synthetic, and loosened up in their thought. Our Mills women who showed warmer smiles reflected these benefits of positive emotion across their lives.

Our results concerning the relationships of the Mills alumnae were perhaps even more striking. These women were brought to UC Berkeley to spend a day with other individuals, as well as a group of scientists who wrote up personal narratives based on their impressions of the women. Women with warm smiles made much more favorable impressions upon the scientists in this context, suggesting that the smile enables more positive social encounters.

Turning to marriage, those women who displayed warmer smiles were more likely to be married by age twenty-seven, less likely to have remained single into middle adulthood, and more likely to have satisfying marriages thirty years later. Much has been made of the toxic effect on marriages of negative emotions like contempt and ceaseless carping and criticism. John Gottman and Robert Levenson can predict with 92 percent accuracy that a couple will divorce when the partners show high levels of contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These negative emotions are like poison. What about marital happiness? Here Gottman and colleagues are starting to show that respect, kindness, and humor help married couples deal more effectively with conflict in their relationships. This was the story in our study: Women with warmer smiles had healthier marriages.

Finally, women with warmer smiles at age twenty reported a more fulfilling life at age fifty-two. Across young and middle adulthood, women prone to expressing positive emotions experience fewer psychological and physical difficulties and greater satisfaction with their lives.

You are probably thinking several things right now about this study. Most importantly, what did you look like in your yearbook photos? (I was wearing a velvet bow tie in one yearbook photo, with a silk disco shirt and a slightly uncomfortable smile.) More importantly, you should definitely be searching through that cardboard box of family memorabilia out in the garage to find out what your partner looked like, for that is likely to say a lot about your own current happiness.

What about the following alternative thesis—the just say yes thesis—that what we’re observing in this pattern of results is simply women who say yes to everything, regardless of whether they truly endorse what they are saying, or are happy or not. Perhaps there is a certain group of our women who, in the desire to please others, smile, say they feel connected to others, report accomplishing their life’s work, and report being happy in their marriages; but in actuality their lives are a neurotic mess of anxiety, self-deception, and despair. There is a measure of this tendency to say socially desirable things to others, and in fact, when we statistically controlled for the women’s tendency toward this, all of the results held up. The warm smile has positive benefits independent of just being outwardly and inauthentically agreeable to others.