Booth Id:
BEHA043
Category:
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Year:
2022
Finalist Names:
Sherbrooke, Elizabeth (School: Hankinson Public School)
Abstract:
Since 2020, our world has been full of low communication and no sight of physical smiles. Because of this, I wanted to see if people, after the pandemic is starting to slow down, if they were to smile back after seeing someone else smile. Smiling has been known to increase serotonin levels and overall make people generally happier. I wanted to see in what conditions and other specifications of whether people smiled back or not. Throughout public places, workplace, school and in the community, I smiled at people and would note if they smiled back or didn't. I documented weather, assumed age range, group size, time of day, and day of week to determine what conditions someone would smile back in. I documented all of my data in Microsoft Excel and produced graphs through the same source. I concluded that with cloudy or snowy weather, people at work and the adult age range in a small group or alone, had less smiles back. The elder community and young adult age ranges in public had the highest rate of smiling back. Generally, as temperature increased, the amount of smiles back increased as well.