Transcripts

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 50's and managed to follow those folks. Women who were smiling in their college yearbooks had higher life satisfaction, lower divorce rates, and basically were happier people forty years later than women who were not smiling in their college yearbooks.

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