Say ‘Cheese’
Most people look at their school yearbook photos with a mixture of nostalgia (“Gee, whatever happened to fuzzy sweaters?”) and horror (“Ack! The hair from Mars!”).
David K. Dodd, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, sees something else entirely.
Dodd studied 16,514 yearbook photos of students from elementary school through college, spanning the period from 1968 to 1997. He wasn’t interested in fashion or hair; instead, he compared the smile rates of girls versus boys. His research suggests that around the fourth grade, girls have begun smiling more than boys, and that the “grin gap” peaks in the ninth grade and might have to do with the traits that girls and boys think are pleasing to the opposite sex.
The study “Smiling in School Yearbook Photos: Gender Difference from Kindergarten to Adulthood” appeared in the December issue of the Psychological Record, a journal published by Kenyon College in Ohio.
In kindergarten, Dodd reported, girls and boys smile for the camera in roughly equal proportion: 59% versus 54%. By fourth grade, 89% of girls smile, compared with 77% of boys. By ninth grade, the gap is as large as it gets: 70% of girls versus 43% of boys. Although the gap narrows after that, it remains substantial, with high school seniors smiling at a rate of 84% for girls, 65% for boys, and college seniors smiling at a rate of 87% for women, 64% for men.
The study did not attempt to cover old ground--that girls smile more than boys because they are socialized to please. Rather, it attempted to pinpoint the age at which this difference is significant.
“It’s a new little fillip to gender research,” said Doe Lang, a New York City psychologist specializing in nonverbal communication.
In an interview, Dodd said the gender smile gap emerges at a time of heightened interest in the opposite sex because “smiling is a form of communication, not just a momentary expression of feeling. It’s an expression of personality.”
If the smile gap were just a matter of how we socialize girls and boys differently, said Dodd, “you’d expect to see it at an early age, 4 to 6 years old. But it’s interesting to me that this differential in smiling doesn’t happen until age 9 or 10. It shifts [the focus] from what kids are taught directly by their families to what they learn indirectly by social expectations.”
By the end of elementary school, Dodd said, “children are receiving messages to behave differently, relative to sex roles and the ideals for the different genders.”
And, he said, they are responding: “The ideal girl, for boys, is pleasant, humorous, nonthreatening, carefree. The ideal boy, for girls, is strong, silent, athletic and serious.”
Dacher Keltner, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley who specializes in emotion and facial expression, said Dodd’s study is valuable.
“It suggests girls use smiles more strategically at that age [beginning in fourth grade] than boys,” he said. Keltner’s reservation about Dodd’s study is that the meaning of the smiles is ambiguous. “Are girls in fourth grade happier than boys,” he wondered, “or are they using the display of a smile to be polite?”
Although other studies have proved that, in social settings, women smile more often and more enthusiastically than men, none of the psychologists interviewed for this study was aware of research covering such a range of ages.
Because females are believed to be socialized to please more than males, whether by appearance or behavior, Dodd initially thought the female propensity to smile might diminish somewhat in photos dating from the 1970s. “With [that decade’s] emphasis on women’s rights and equality, we thought that the gap in smiling might narrow--that women might be less likely to smile,” he said. “But there was no evidence of that.”
Evidence of the cultural imperative of the happy-faced woman abounds. Ten years ago, Dodd studied portrayals of men and women in print advertising, and found that women “were much more likely to smile, even in photos depicting a couple.”
Eventually, Dodd hopes to conduct a study analyzing smiles in spontaneous photographs of children at play. After all, in a portrait situation, when the photographer commands, “Say ‘Cheese!’ ” people-pleasers are inclined to do so.
