GELATO IS THE FOOD OF HAPPINESS

Gelato is the food of happiness and appears to be one of the most popular expressions of happiness these days.
This is the result of a study sponsored by the Italian Gelato Institute and performed by two IT researchers at the University of Amsterdam who have created a software capable of tracing the mutations of facial features and correlating them with the emotions that they signify.

According to the study, when Italians eat gelato their faces express 86% happiness, this beats chocolate which reaches only 61%.
Researches, to give an example of how the test works, used the most famous smile of all, that of the Mona Lisa, as one of their subjects. It turned out that her smile is made up of 83% happiness while the rest is divided between disgust (9%), fear (6%) and anger (2%), thus the enigmatic result.

The Dutch researchers have created a program that can recognize human expressions by interpreting the lines of a face, for example, the curve of the mouth and the movement around the eyes. It marks the parts of the face that move when expressions change and assigns each movement a point corresponding to five fundamental emotions: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. All of these nuances are then compared to an expression database that has been collected by the researchers. There are the expressions of female faces (because they are more “readable” than male faces) from which one expression was taken as the neutral reference point.

The Amsterdam study also confirms another study that was performed by the London Institute of Psychiatry that, with the use of brain imaging, concluded a spoonful of ice cream is enough to stimulate the same areas of pleasure in the brain as that of winning money or listening to one’s favorite music.