When I was a child, I always wanted to be superhero. I want to save the word and make everyone happy. But I knew that I’d need superpower to make my dream come true. So I used to embark on imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton, Which was a lot of fun but didn’t get much result. When I grow up and realized that science fiction was not good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science to find a more useful truth. I start my journey in California with UC Berkley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring their student smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject’s marriage will be, how well she would score on standardize tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama’s picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that these superpowers came from his super collar. But now I know it was all in his smile. Another aha! Moment came from a 2010 Wayne University research project that look into pre-1950s baseball cards of major league cards. These researchers found that the span of player’s smile could actually predict the span of his life. Player Who didn’t smile in their pictures live average of only 72.9 years, where player’s with beaming smiles lived average of almost 80 years. The good news is that we are actually born smiling. Used 3D ultrasound technology, we can see that developing babies appear to smile even in the womb. When they are born, babies continue to smile, initially ,mostly in their sleep. And even blind babies smile to the sound of human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically-uniform expressions of all humans. In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea,Paul Ekman, the world’s most renowned researcher on facial expressions found that even members of the Fore tribe who were completely disconnected from Western culture and also know for their unusual cannibalism rituals attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and you smile to express joy an satisfaction. How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? Raise you hand if you do. Outside this room, more than third of us smile more than 20 times per day whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day. Have you ever wonder why being around children who smile so frequently makes you smile very often ? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it’s very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask, why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically help us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler. In a recent mimicking study at the university of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth when they could not mimic the smile they saw, their judgment was impaired. In addition to theorizing on evolution in “The Origin of species,”Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who used electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don’t try this at home. In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/4b7a0c1210a6f524ccbf859f.html