Kids: Smile for a Good Marriage

Image by phil wood photo via Flickr

A new study (PDF) highlighted by Scientific American finds that people who smile wider in childhood photographs are more likely to end up happily married:

Pictures of grinning kids may reveal more than childhood happiness: a study from DePauw University shows that how intensely people smile in childhood photographs, as indicated by crow’s feet around the eyes, predicts their adult marriage success.

According to the research, people whose smiles were weakest in snapshots from childhood through young adulthood were most likely to report being divorced in middle and old age. Among the weakest smilers in college photographs, one in four ended up divorcing, compared with one in 20 of the widest smilers. The same pattern held among even those pictured at an average age of 10.

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The scientists speculate that one’s tendency to grin—an example of what psychologists call “thin slices” of behavior that can belie personal traits—reflects his or her underlying emotional disposition. Positive emotionality influences how others respond to a person, perhaps making that individual more open and likely to seek out situations conducive to a lasting, happy marriage.

That’s not the only weird marriage-happiness-predicting factor we’ve seen in recent years…

We also know that personality in adolescence predicts reproductive success later in life.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that couples’ faces begin to look more alike as they age.

Want to move away from soft measures like photo-analysis: How about a genetic test? As discussed in this Nature article, men with a specific gene variant related to the regulation of pair-bonding-related hormones “are twice as likely as men without it to remain unmarried, or when married, twice as likely to report a recent crisis in their marriage.”

We think the reasons we get together and stay together are emotional and profound. What we forget is that emotions have a biological basis. At the end of the day, we’re shaved monkeys — not that different from primates, voles, or any other creature that crawls the earth and occasionally gets its freak on.