A life lesson from the majors: Smile, you'll live longer

But...

A family friend had a stroke. It affected his gate and speech. He found that if he smiled broadly, both his gate and speech became more fluid. This suggests that the act of smiling can change function of the rest of the nervous system.

So who knows?

Or to continue the success-at-time-of-photo idea, maybe they smiled because the photographer smiled at them more, because the photographer was more familiar with them. Could by any number of reasons that the two things were correlated, all of which wouldn't necessarily imply that if you, reader, smile more, then you, reader, will live longer.

Though that's probably true. But yeah, easy to forget that a smile itself is very much an effect of something else. Concluding that if you 'smile more', something good will happen is sort of a false optimization. Smarter to figure out what you should be smiling about. And if you're not, be in search of why.

P.S. In other news, the New York Giants? Really? There's more concrete psychology in that Freudian slip. And then you look at who they chose for the info graphic. The Brooklin Dodgers? Nice try, Boston.

Roy Campanella spent most of his life in a wheelchair after a horrible car accident.

Mickey Mantle drank more alcohol than many small countries.

Do you think these things just might have a little more impact on longevity than smiling?

I haven't read the research article, and I agree that smiling doesn't hurt, but this post surely doesn't make it sound very scientific. I wouldn't drop the "Correlation is not causation" bomb, but they seem to have missed it.