Statewide Iowa — A new University of Iowa study finds Olympic bronze medalists tend to appear happier on the podium than the silver medalists who beat them.
U of I marketing professor Andrea Luangrath focuses much of her research on non-verbal communication and is using high-tech software that can detect emotions from facial expressions in photos and video.
So why do the third-place finishers smile more broadly than those in second-place? It has to do with “counterfactual thinking,” or imagining an alternate reality. The silver medalist, Luangrath says, tends to make an upward comparison, looking to the gold medal winner and thinking, “If only I’d been a little better.”
Perhaps the most recognized silver medal winner in recent years is American gymnast McKayla Maroney. She made the famous “not impressed” grimace after finishing second in the women’s vault at the 2012 Games in London. The U-I professor says it’s the perfect example of this phenomenon as Maroney underperformed.
The software used in the research can read a person’s facial expression by the shapes and positions of their mouths, eyes, eyebrows, noses, and other parts of the face. Not surprisingly, the study found gold medalists are far more likely to smile than the other two medalists, and people who finished better than expected were also more likely to smile, regardless of their medal. The study, “Counterfactual Thinking and Facial Expressions Among Olympic Medalists,” was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
