A happy life isn't always filled with trivial chatter; rather more reflective and profound conversations really can lead to happiness. Psychological scientists from the University of Arizona and Washington University investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the types of conversations they tend to engage in.
For this study, volunteers wore an unobtrusive recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) over four days. This device periodically records snippets of sounds as participants go about their lives. Researchers then listened to the recordings and identified the conversations as trivial small talk or substantive discussions. In addition, the volunteers completed personality and well-being assessments.
As reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, analysis of the recordings revealed some very interesting findings. Greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more time talking to others. In addition to the difference in the amount of social interactions happy and unhappy people had, there was also a difference in the types of conversations they took part in. The happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. These findings suggest that the happy life is social and conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial.
The researchers say that (though the current findings cannot identify the causal direction) deep conversations may have the potential to make people happier. They also note that just as self-disclosure can instil a sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instil a sense of meaning in the interaction partners.
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