The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 11, 2007

Official News page 8


REAL LIFE NEWS: SMILE, AND THE WORLD SMILES WITH YOU

by Hazed

In a two-for-the-price-of-one offer, I bring you two stories about the power of a smile.

First up, it seems that you are more likely to think other people are attractive if they look straight at you and smile. Scientists from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland paired nearly identical photos of computer-generated faces, with smiling or disgusted expressions. The pair differed only in where the irises of the eyes were pointing - straight at the viewer, or off to the side.

Several hundred students, in the lab and online, rated the faces for sexual attractiveness, and for likeability. Both men and women found faces looking straight at them to be more attractive and more likeable, even if the faces looked disgusted; unsurprisingly, there was also a greater preference for smiles too.

The preference for a smile was much greater when men were rating the faces of women for attractiveness (presumably they were all straight men).

So if you want to attract a partner, you need to stare right at them and keep smiling. Of course, that could just make you look like a crazy stalker!

You can read more info in this New Scientist article.

The other smiley story is that you can use smiles to reduce tension in the workplace. No, that doesn't mean you wander around grinning manically at each other all day (see above re: crazy stalkers). But playing a computer game which encourages a positive attitude reduces stress.

Scientists from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, asked workers in a call center to play a simply game for 5 minutes before they started work. The game involved finding an image of a single smiling face amongst a batch of photos, the rest of which showed people frowning. They had to find the smile as fast as possible. The team found that the employees who had played the game produced 17% less of the stress hormone cortisol after their shift than those who didn't play the game.

Fascinating stuff! Anything that reduces the tension that working in a call center must produce is to be applauded.

Read more here.


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