The effects of smiling on perceived age defy belief

Abstract

It is a common belief that smiling makes people appear younger. Empirical findings, however, suggest that smiling faces are actually perceived as older than neutral faces. Here we show that these two apparently contradictory phenomena can co-exist in the same person. In the first experiment, participants were first asked to estimate the ages of a series of smiling or neutral faces. After that, they were asked to estimate the average age of the set of neutral and smiling faces they had just evaluated. Finally, they were asked what effect smiling has on one's perceived age. In the experimental session, smiling faces were perceived as older than neutral faces. Nevertheless, after the experiment, consistent with their retrospective evaluations, participants recalled smiling faces as being younger than the neutral faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these results to a set of emotional expressions that also included surprised faces. Smiling faces were again perceived as older than neutral faces, which were in turn perceived as older than surprised faces. Again, retrospective evaluations were consistent with the belief that smiling makes people look younger. The findings show that this belief, well-rooted in popular media, is a complete misconception.

Age of smile: A cross-cultural replication report of Ganel and Goodale (2018)

“…From these results, Ganel and Goodale claimed that the belief that smiling makes one appear younger is a misconception rooted in popular media, given that smiling faces are not perceived as younger than faces with other expressions in direct evaluation. Ganel and Goodale's (2018) study provided evidence that age estimation differs between direct and retrospective evaluations; however, it has not yet been verified whether the belief that smiling makes one appear younger can be generalized across cultures. Ganel and Goodale's (2018) study had two limitations.…”

“…Ganel and Goodale's (2018) study provided evidence that age estimation differs between direct and retrospective evaluations; however, it has not yet been verified whether the belief that smiling makes one appear younger can be generalized across cultures. Ganel and Goodale's (2018) study had two limitations. First, Ganel and Goodale's results may have been affected by their use of faces selected only from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) database (Lundqvist et al, 1998).…”

“…Therefore, we cannot determine whether this potentially biased age estimation is a universal tendency; it may be moderated by ethnicity and culture. Ganel and Goodale (2018) claimed that people believe (though mistakenly) that smiling makes faces look younger.…”

“…Despite these reports on cultural differences in face perception, studies on age estimation have rarely dealt with culture, perhaps because of the limited opportunity to estimate the age of people of other cultures in real life. Therefore, we hypothesized that a new significant interaction could be observed when replicating Ganel and Goodale's (2018) We collected data from separate groups of Japanese and Swedish participants, and in an extension of Ganel and Goodale's (2018) study, we had subgroups from each respective population estimate the age of both Japanese and Swedish faces. The present study replicated Ganel and Goodale's Experiment 2, in which surprised faces were added to the facial stimuli, because surprised expressions are not typically associated with either positive or negative traits (Meyer et al, 1997) and they decrease the appearance of wrinkles around the eyes (Ekman et al, 1980).…”

A variety of processes that affect the perception of skin aging

“…Stereotypically, it is believed that smiling people look younger. For example, young people judge smiling people as being younger and sad people as being older [32]. However, a single study has shown that excessive smiling can generate an overestimation of perceived age.…”