Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

When you see the exchange of D smiles between a father and a toddler on a swing, between two adults flirting in the corner of a room, between two friends laughing over their latest efforts at work or romance, or between two strangers navigating who goes through the door first or who takes the last egg roll at the buffet—one cannot help but be struck by the simplicity of social pleasure. Two smiles are exchanged within the span of a second or two, this small but universal element of decorum is honored, and the day continues. Within the bodies of those individuals, however, are reciprocally coordinated surges of dopamine and the opiates. Stress-related cardiovascular response reduces. A sense of trust and social well-being rises. The smile is the dessert of our social lives. It evolved as a neon-light signal of cooperativeness, it became embedded in social exchanges between individuals that give rise to closeness and affiliation. The right kind of smile is a common contributor to the numerator of the jen ratio and a gateway to the life well lived. And this was the hypothesis I tested in an unusual study of yearbook photos of graduates from a small women’s college in 1960, just about to head out into a world that would turn tumultuous.

FLEETING MOMENTS OF THE COURSE OF LIFE

 

Ravenna Helson is a pioneer in the study of women’s lives. In the early stages of her scientific career in the 1950s, she was interested in the intellectual creativity of women—an area almost entirely ignored by psychological science—and interviewed female pioneers in mathematics and the physical sciences. She then turned her scientific imagination to the question of how identity develops. Almost all of the longitudinal research on identity and the course of life had been done on men; the lifespan development of the other half of the species was a mystery. In 1959, a few years prior to publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ravenna initiated what would become the longest longitudinal study of the lives of women ever conducted, the Mills Longitudinal Study. This study has followed the lives of approximately 110 women who graduated from Mills College in 1959 and 1960 for the past fifty years, and continues to this day. It has led to basic discoveries about how identity shifts over the course of life for women, and how it remains the same.

In 1999 Ravenna stopped by my office with a generous offer. She noted, in her slight Texas drawl and gentle style, that she had gathered college yearbook photos of her subjects. She wondered whether I might be interested, with a student of hers, LeeAnne Harker, in exploring whether her Mills participants’ smiles, captured when they were graduating from college, would say anything about the next thirty years of their lives. The more conventional side to my scientific mind predisposed me to politely decline. The premise that expressive behavior gathered in one instant in time (in the few milliseconds it takes for the shutter to open) in such an artificial context (having your yearbook photo taken by a stranger) could actually predict anything meaningful about an individual’s life violated the most sacred laws of studying individuals scientifically. Within the study of individuals, it is canonical to sample a person’s behavior many times and in a diverse and revealing array of contexts. A more representative sampling of observations guarantees more reliable inferences about who the person is. If you want to know whom to marry or what friend to travel with, you’re best served by seeing them when grumpy in the morning after a bad night’s sleep, when handling the stress of a conflict, when experiencing pain, around their mothers and ex-spouses, and when things go really well, and not just when sparkling in witty repartee at a cocktail party. Relying upon one yearbook photo as a potential measure of the person’s identity was problematic in this regard, to say the least.

Also problematic was the notion of discerning muscle movements from static photos. All research on facial expression had relied upon video or moving pictures, in which the effects of the facial muscle movements are evident in the onset and offset of changes in the appearance of the face. In identifying D smiles, for example, one needs to see the crow’s-feet, cheek raise, and lower eyelid pouch, all subtle judgments that are best made when one can see these actions appear and disappear in video over time.

Undaunted, LeeAnne Harker and I took a week to code the yearbook photos of 110 women, carefully looking for evidence of the activity of the zygomatic major muscle as well as the oribicularis oculi. This coding produced a score between 0 and 10 capturing the warmth of each woman’s smile.