We were looking at old family photos on Mother’s Day. I think my marriage (of 15 years) should last, based on that article. 
What a very strange idea for a research subject.
On the other hand now I can completely screw up my children by telling them they have to smile for the camera so they don’t end up divorced later. Isn’t science great?!
Some groups who are ideologically committed to reducing the divorce rate sponsor a fair amount of research on predictors of successful marriage. If the goal is to find such indicators, then I suppose checking for smiles in photos isn’t the craziest place to look.
Hm…when my siblings and I were kids, our pictures always seemed to come out with weird grimaces or smirks. Maybe we just weren’t very photogenic. What does that portend for our marriages?
(So far so good; 4 solid marriages ATM.)
What a complete crock. Successful marriage is defined as one that is not divorced? How many miserable couples do you know? I know several.
Smiling for the camera is no guarantee of a more social or more obedient disposition. I know someone who not only smiles, but “vogues” and she’s a desperately unhappy alcoholic, she’s just narcissistic enough to want to look good for the camera…
There may well be some kind of correlation here–but correlation is not causation.
I have hundreds of photos of me and my brother where he is smiling in one and me in the next and sometimes both and sometimes neither.
Usually, the difference is not “how friendly you are” but whether there was something better to do, whether we had just be nagged to have our hair combed or tie straightened …
Nothing long-term is in the randomly selected photograph.
OK, so what clear, objective standard would you use for separating “successful” marriages from “unsuccessful” ones?
True. Besides, what would these studies have the non-smilers do? Marry smilers, to increase the chance of their marriage succeeding? Marry other non-smilers, because misery loves company and to keep out of smilers’ succesfull marriages? To keep smiling, camera or not, regardless of how they feel? Or to withdraw from the gene pool alltogether and never marry?
Therein lies the problem, doesn’t it? While it’s highly unlikely that a good marriage would end in divorce, there are many bad marriages where the couple stays together due to a variety of reasons - religious, social, economic, emotional, etc. Nor is this a binary issue. My first marriage was massively better than my ex-in-laws marriage, but it was mine that ended in divorce. Neither marriage was successful Some divorces could have been averted with the right help, some marriages should have never begun.
It’s easy to say “Is this couple still together or divorced”, but it makes for bad data; especially because far, far fewer good marriages are going to end in divorce than vice versa. This data often used by religious conservatives to promote the “never divorce” credo. Frankly, I would prefer that people have no data than bad data!
What I object to about this “study” is that it is talking about something that can’t be changed (the past) and if you were to modify future behavior (say, by making sure your kids always smile in photos), would not do anything truly productive to ensure better marriages.
If I were to construct an experiment researching something related to whether a marriage was successful or not, what I would do is this: have each person in the marriage fill out a (fairly large) questionnaire that involved selecting from a list of adjectives or selecting between paired adjectives(better) that described the partner. Marriages could then be ranked on the ratio between positive and negative traits. I read about a study several years ago that did something like this and found that it had an 80% predictive rate of whether a couple would divorce in five years. Not only was this more objective (whether an adjective was positive or negative was established in a separate study), but it also provided an objective - using more positive terminology.
Heh- the last two posts of yours I have read contain the word “narcisstic”… 
I had one question after reading that story. What college still makes/sells a yearbook? I mean, I know they used to exist, but do they still? I went to a small (~2000 student) public university, and we didn’t have it. I’ve got a few of my dad’s, but that was from the early/mid 60’s.