A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2017 found that just by looking at someone you can tell whether he or she is rich or poor.

`The relationship between happiness and social class has been proven through several previous studies,` said R. Thora Bjornsdottir, a PhD student at the University of Toronto (Canada) and co-author of the study.

In general, people who have money tend to live less worried lives than those who struggle to make ends meet.

Bjornsdottir and his colleague, psychology professor Nicholas O. Rule (University of Toronto, Canada) showed 81 students of various ethnicities black and white photos of 80 men and 80 women, ages 18 and up.

Half of them were people earning more than $150,000 a year, which researchers designated the upper class, and the other half earning less than $35,000 a year were the working class.

When survey participants were asked to guess the class of the person in the spotlight, they guessed correctly 68% of the time, significantly higher than if they guessed at random.

“I didn’t think the effect would be that strong, especially considering the subtle differences in the faces.

According to graduate student Bjornsdottir, survey participants were not initially aware of the cues to make this assessment.

The researchers zoomed in on the facial features of 160 study subjects.

“Because people often use their mouths to express positive emotions, like smiling.

And Bjornsdottir said this effect “could be due to emotional patterns that have been etched into their faces over time.”

“Over time, your face will forever reflect and reveal your experiences,” says Rule. “Even when we think we are not expressing something, traces of our emotions

In other words: If someone has had a generally happy, prosperous life, that person will look happy even while maintaining a supposedly “normal” facial expression.

They also found that participants were equally good at analyzing wealth and poverty whether they looked at a photo for as long as they wanted or for just half a second.

This unconscious assessment was also corroborated again in the survey.