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Smiling makes you look older
Open accessAbstract
People smile in social interactions to convey different types of nonverbal communication. However, smiling can potentially change the way a person is perceived along different facial dimensions, including perceived age. It is commonly assumed that smiling faces are perceived as younger than faces carrying a neutral expression. In the series of experiments reported here, I describe an unintuitive and robust effect in the opposite direction. Across different experimental conditions and stimulus sets, smiling faces were consistently perceived as older compared to neutral face photos of the same persons. I suggest that this effect is due to observer failure to ignore smile-associated wrinkles, mainly along the region of the eyes. These findings point to a misconception regarding the relationship between facial smile and perceived age and shed new light on the processes underlying human age perception.
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“First, prior studies compared essays written entirely by students and those generated entirely by ChatGPT 7-8,14,15 . However, this may not accurately reflect how most students interact with AI chatbots in reality.”
From Style, sentiment, and quality of undergraduate writing in the AI era: A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of 4,820 authentic empirical reports (2025) · cites this paper as [15]
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“Second, the vast majority of prior studies 11-15 focused on short, factual essays (300-600 words), so it remains unclear whether their results extend to lengthy empirical reports that require data interpretationan assessment format common in social and life sciences.”
From Style, sentiment, and quality of undergraduate writing in the AI era: A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of 4,820 authentic empirical reports (2025) · cites this paper as [15]
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Research works printed but not linked: 24
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Cited by
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Mak, M. H. C., & Walasek, L. (2025) · Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1016/j.caeai.2025.100507 · Cited by 10
“…from our psychology programme typically submitted three empirical reports — one per year — progressing from replication of an existing study (e.g., Ganel, 2015) in Year 1 (~2000 words) to an extension (e.g., Mak et al., 2025) in Year 2 (~4000 words), and finally an original dissertation (4000…”
Metadata
- Authors
- Ganel, T.
- Affiliations
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (IL)
- Corresponding author
- Ganel, Tzvi
- ORCID
- Ganel, Tzvi
- Venue
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
- Published
- 2015-04-09
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1671-1677
- ISSN
- 1069-9384 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-5320
- OpenAlex
- W1986809092
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 3 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 2.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Aging and Gerontology Research
- Keywords
- smiling, perceived age, age perception, facial expressions, nonverbal communication, facial wrinkles, eye region, face perception, observer bias
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Aging, Female, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Male, Middle Aged, Random Allocation, Smiling, Visual Perception
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