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Longevity and Happiness

We all strive for happy and loving relationships, but these also might lead to longer, healthier lives!

A recent study by Dr. Olga Stavrova of Tilburg University found that when one’s spouse reports high levels of life satisfaction, there is a significant and substantive decrease in mortality risk. This builds from past research finding that a spouse’s happiness positive impacts relationship satisfaction and career success.  Her research helps demonstrate the impact that other people’s emotions can have on our health.

While many common paradigms on health largely focus on intrapersonal factors such as diet and exercise, there is an emerging body of research that has pointed to interpersonal impacts. This would suggest that not only do interpersonal emotions structure our social reality, but they impact our bodily health as well.

Importantly, Dr. Stavrova emphasized that her findings were true “regardless of individuals’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, or their physical health status.”

This current study pushes that research even further by looking at 4,400 couples over fifty years old, examining the relationship between emotions and mortality rates. She also looked at mediating factors such as partner support and physical activity.

Each couple was asked to self-report their life satisfaction, perception of support from their partner, and their level of physical activity. Each participant was then reexamined several years later and was coded based on whether they were deceased during this period. Dr. Stavrova then conducted a series of statistical analyses to determine whether life satisfaction increased or decreased the likelihood of death.

Overall, she found a significant relationship between satisfaction and mortality, with each standard deviation increase in the spouse’s life satisfaction resulting in a 13 percent lower risk of death. This was partially mediated by the partner and participant’s level of physical activity. When one’s partner has higher levels of life satisfaction, they are more likely to exercise as a couple.

Dr. Stavrova summarized this finding quite succinctly: “If your partner is depressed and wants to spend the evening eating chips in front of the TV — that’s how your evening will probably end up looking, as well.”

Importantly, this impact was comparable to or even greater than other major predictors of mortality, such as household income and education. Moreover, a spouse’s life satisfaction was as powerful a predictor as one’s own life satisfaction and personality traits like neuroticism.

Readers of this blog might notice a similarity between these findings and those we reported a couple weeks ago on the relationship between walking speed/health and personality traits!

Overall, these findings help us further understanding the importance of emotion in our lives. Our emotions, as well as those of our close friends and family, can have a huge impact on our health and our mortality, making the goal of understanding other people’s emotions even more critical.

Not All Smiles Are the Same

While we tend to associate smiling almost exclusively with joy or happiness, this may lead us pretty far astray.

In fact, there are many different types of smiles and only a few can really be classified as happy smiles. As a recent article in the BBC outlines, of the perhaps 19 different types of smiles, only six indicate pleasant emotions. Instead, the remainder can designate contempt, anger, or even deception. If we want to effectively read people, exploring the differences between smiles is necessary.

One of these is, of course, the relatively well-known Duchenne smile.  This smile was identified as part of the 19th century experiments of Duchenne de Boulogne who sought to explore the underlying muscular configurations behind facial expressions. While he identified over sixty facial expressions, the Duchenne smile is perhaps his most famous discovery.

This expression, characterized by a wide, almost comically overblown, smile, is generally associated with genuine happiness and pleasure. Importantly, this expression is usually associated with “crow’s feet,” particular creases around the eyes. These crow’s feet are often seen as indicating genuine happiness.

Not all cultures encourage such open smiles. Instead, in Scandinavian, Russian, or Japanese cultures, overt smiles are frowned upon. This tends to lead to more “dampened smiles” where the mouth is slightly raised and the lips gently pushed together. While the mouth in these smiles is hardly affected, there is instead an emphasis on showing happiness through the eyes.

However, these sorts of genuine smiles are not the only kind of smile to be aware of. There is also the “miserable smile.” While this appears quite similar, it is usually asymmetrical and overshadowed by a grimace-like look of sadness. It was Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto’s work which identified this smile among silver medalist athletes, including blind ones, suggesting that it is a universal expression.

There are also more concerning smiles to look out for. One of these is the “contempt” smile.  This expression combines both expressions of disgust and resentment but looks quite close to a genuine smile. Instead, it is similar in most respects but the corners of the lips remain taught rather than crinkled. This smile is especially common in East Asian cultures where overt anger is discouraged.

Similarly, there are fake smiles and blended smiles. In the former case, false smiles differ only subtly from the Duchenne smile. Unfortunately, these differences are hard to detect, as the Duchenne smile is easily faked. Testing the accuracy of a smile often demands that we compare it to other smiles that we have seen, ideally from the same person. It is the deviations from these norms that help determine if it is false.

Finally, blended smiles exist when people express a genuine Duchenne smile but layer on contempt, fear, or sadness. These smiles may look very similar but are tinged with clearly different intentions. This may be determined in a similar fashion to fake smiles but also by looking at whether a genuine smile even makes sense for that person in that context.

Hopefully, this gives some indication to how many different variations of smiles there are. It is important again to emphasize cultural differences here, as that can have a significant impact on what sort of smile is being displayed.

While it may be hard to take this information into the field, it might help get you starting on a people reading class or even a class dedicated to cross-cultural communication!

The Personality of Walking

Often in crowded cities, we clash with those who walk much more slowly, or we hold up those who walk faster. Is there an explanation for this variation?

According to a team of researchers, personality traits may help predict how quickly or slowly we will walk. In a creative study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Dr. Yannick Stephan and his team looked at over 15 thousand individuals, tracking how quickly they walked and also measures of traditional personality traits like extraversion and neuroticism.

We rarely talk about walking speed, but isn’t it an important nonverbal behavior?

While past research has connecting walking speed to health, there are also compelling connections between personality traits and health. For instance, those high in neuroticism and low in extraversion tend to exercise less frequently and be in poorer health. While gait speed might not sound that important, this study attempts to further explore the relationship between our physical health and our personality.

For context, the researchers utilize a measure of five personality traits that has long been common in psychology. This includes neuroticism (a disposition towards negative emotions), extraversion, openness to new experiences, conscientiousness (a measure of organization and self-discipline), and agreeableness.

It might be suspected that data on gait speed would be hard to come by, but amazingly the researchers employed an incredible treasure trove of information on individuals’ personality traits and walking speeds. Some of this was even longitudinal, allowing an understanding of these relationships over time.

Overall, they found that personality features successfully predict walking speed, even when measured years before. They tended to find similar relationships even between different samples and age/demographic groups.

Extraversion and conscientiousness consistently predict higher walking speeds. This may seem intuitive, if we imagine an extraverted friend or someone who is quite self-disciplined. However, the opposite was true of neuroticism which declined more steadily over time and was associated slower gait speeds initially.

These findings are consistent with previous research finding the same connections between those personality types and health. By seeing how this is manifest in gait speed, a great deal of information can be inferred and further explored about how we express our personalities. Gait speed can then be used as a reliable predictor for both health and personality type, benefitting researchers, patients, and diagnosticians alike.

While this might seem a bit far afield from Humintell’s usual work, it really isn’t. Gait speed can be seen as an important nonverbal behavior!

Can you attempt to read people based on their pace? Rather than being in a hurry, they might just be really extraverted!