Something to Smile About

Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans.

His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good.

Poor Barack Obama didn t even have that to offer.

And, unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier.

Two Do the Middle Eastern characters laugh or smile without showing the whites of their eyes?

Give me anything that might give me a hope and I will smile I replyed.

He cries out, Ahmadinejad, I am hungry! Ahmadinejad, I am hungry! Ahmadinejad keeps smiling and waving as he peers out from the sunroof of the car.

In Peru, Twitter users turned to the hashtag DNIfeliz to encourage citizens to smile for their ID document photo, commonly known as DNI.

Wait. The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds Sterling in cash.

But isn t this what politicians like to do smile for the cameras, and then fail to honor their promises? I would say that the situation is far more serious than that.

In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who used electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles.

Smiling can help reduce the level of stress enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood enhancing hormones like endorphin and reduce overall blood pressure.

Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results. Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you'll live and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well being? Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior.

The finding supported Darwin's theory by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain in a way that helps us feel better when we smile.

In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles.

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.