Do Gender and Age Affect Smiling? (continued)

Two groups were studied in this project. One was a random selection of yearbooks, grades fifth through eighth. The other was a sequence of yearbooks following the same group of students from first grade through eighth. Similar results were found in each group. I found that in the upper grades girls were smiling more than boys were. When looking at the top three grades, there seems to be a pattern. Just before the significant results in the top two grades there is no difference found between girls smiling and boys smiling. Is this because they are just hitting puberty and are not yet conscience of the opposite sex? 

It is also interesting to note that with the same students who are from more recent yearbooks the grade before significant results is in fifth grade and with the mixed students from much older yearbooks it is in sixth grade. If this is when they hit puberty, this may support the fact that children today are beginning puberty at an earlier age? 

In the sample of different students, a significant result was found in fifth grade, the girls were smiling more than the boys were. This was puzzling because it didn't follow the pattern that was in the sample of same students. If it were to follow this pattern it would have been expected to be insignificant with little difference between girls and boys smiling. It might have helped the understanding of this if there were results for this sample in first, second, third and fourth grade.

In the group where we looked at the same students there were no data for fourth grade. Would this have been significant or insignificant?

Overall this study has shown that age and gender has an effect on smiling. A future study should be done to fill in some of the missing data. The eighth grade yearbook for the same students was not available when this investigation was carried out but will be later in the year, data from that could also be collected.

As there has been little research done on smiling there are a lot of things to explore about it. One study that could branch off this one would be to see how blindness effects smiling. Another study that could be done would be to see if males perceive a smile differently than females. What roles does the stereotype man and woman have to do with the difference in smiling? This investigation has shown how complex the simple smile can be.

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