14 DAY TRIAL // A collaboration of investigators in the United States has recently determined that people who spend their time with others by having deep, meaningful conversations tend to be happier than their peers. Conversely, in the case of those who only chit-chat and talk about trivial things, the level of happiness they experience appears to decline. The new work was conducted by researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSl) and the University of Arizona, PhysOrg reports. Details of the investigation were published in a recent issue of the respected journal Psychological Sciences.
Individuals that are gregarious and outgoing are most likely to experience increased levels of happiness, the researchers say, as well as more intense feelings of personal well-being. The amount of time each person spends on his or her own was also found to be a clear indicator of how happy they felt about their lives overall. The conclusions of the study are based on a 4-day-long survey of 79 men and women, all of them college students. The researchers paid attention to what they were talking about, and then tried to find correlations between this data and the participants' level of happiness.
“Having more conversation, no matter how trivial, appears to be associated with a greater sense of happiness among the people in our study. The happiest were people who engaged often in more meaningful and substantive discussions, as opposed to those who filled conversations with idle chit-chat and small talk,” says WUSL Department of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of psychology Simine Vazire, PhD, who is also a coauthor of the new journal entry. The investigators collected about 20,000 audio snippets from all subjects, as the individuals carried recording devices on themselves.
The sounds were collected randomly, once every 12.5 minutes, and each snippet was 30 seconds long. Those who were identified as being most happy were 30 percent less likely to be spending time alone. In 70 percent of the cases, they were engaged in meaningful conversations with another person, the team found.
“Overall, these findings suggest that meaningful interactions with others are important for well-being. However, our research cannot determine whether meaningful interactions cause happiness, whether happiness causes people to have more meaningful conversations, or whether there is another explanation. We believe it's likely that both are true – happiness leads to more meaningful connections with others, which then produce more happiness – but this remains to be tested in future research,” Vazire concludes.