Researcher’s view
"Although age estimates can often be based on multiple cues, there are many situations in which a picture of a person's face is the only information that is immediately available," researcher Manuel C. Voelkle of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and colleagues write.

"In particular, with the rise of private- or business-related social networks like Facebook, flickr, LinkedIn, and many others, it has become common practice to share pictures, often without additional background information," they write.

Researchers say pictures of happy faces may be misleading because smiling or laughing creates temporary wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. In a picture, it is harder to tell the difference between temporary wrinkles and real ones.
In addition, smiling has been shown to make people look more attractive, which may make them appear younger.
 

Study -Guessing Age in Photos
In the study, 154 young, middle-aged, and older adults were asked to guess the age of 171 faces of young, middle-aged, and older men and women with various expressions portrayed on a total of 2,052 photographs, which displayed variety of expression including angry, fearful, disgusted, happy, sad and neutral expression.
 

Findings
They found that the great impact of facial expression on accuracy of age guessing, people were able to estimate the age of neutral face more accurately in compare to other facial expression.
On the contrary the happy or smiling faces were misleading. Most adults from study group underestimate the age, on average of about two years of Happy and Smiling faces.

Here it is important to note that the age of the person guessing also played a role, people found it harder to guess the age of older faces than younger faces. The older people were able to guess some one’s age correctly says researchers. Also, both older and younger adults were better at guessing the age of people their own age in comparison to other age group.

Anyway, everybody may agree that, SMILING help us to look YOUNG & ATTRCTIVE’, so Keep Smiling and Be Happy…..

Related reading: Botox treatment to remove fine wrinkles

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