Smiling is good for the spirit, everybody knows that. What we don’t know is the fact that, apparently, smiling can also predict whether our marriages will last forever, according to scientists from DePauw University in Indiana.

 

To be more specific, they said that children with the brightest smiles in family photos haven been found more likely to have successful marriages as adults.

 

“Smile intensity predicted whether or not participants divorced at some point in their lives. The less intensely participants smiled, the more likely they would be divorced later in life,” the researchers said.

 

There were two experiments that have led to this conclusion. In one of them, the researchers looked at people’s college yearbook photos and rated their smiles from 1 to 10. They found that none of the people who fell within the top 10 percent of smile strength had divorced, while within the bottom 10 percent of smilers, almost one in four had had a marriage that ended in divorce.

 

In the second experiment, the researchers asked people over age 65 to provide photos from their childhood. Their smile was rated once again and the researchers found that only 11 percent of the biggest smilers had been divorced, while 31 percent of the frowners had experienced a broken marriage.

 

“It feeds into this idea that what’s occurring earlier in our lives in terms of our present situation and our mental state can predict things that occur decades later. Maybe smiling people attract other happier people, and the combination may lead to a greater likelihood of a long-lasting marriage. We don’t really know for sure what’s causing it,” Matt Hertenstein, associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, said.