Smile strengthens relationships, says study

Smiling can benefit your health, perception at work and social life. A recent study from the researcher Belinda Campos from University of California, Irvine in the US, has revealed that a smile indeed helps you strike a chord with a stranger and also maintain a good relationship with your partner.

To prove this, the researchers conducted two studies to test the role that positive emotions play in relationships. The first one tested how aware 66 dating couples were of their partner’s positive emotions. The researchers found that dating couples were able to quite accurately track their partners' positive emotions.

The second experiment looked at how attuned people are to positive emotions and if it helps them to form new social bonds. This was done by assigning 91 women to watch six emotion-laden film clips in the company of either a roommate or a stranger.

The results showed that people are much more aware of others positive emotions than their negative ones. The study was published in Springer's journal Motivation and Emotion.

By Lizitha