Category: Happiness

All personality types benefit from this type of conversation.

Having more meaningful or ‘deep’ conversations makes people happier, research finds.

Whether extravert or introvert, people who exchanged more meaningful information about relationships, politics or whatever, were happier.

At the other end of the scale, trivial chat or ‘small talk’ had no link to happiness, one way or the other.

Professor Matthias Mehl, who led the study, said:

“We do not think anymore that there is an inherent tension between having small talk and having substantive conversations.

Small didn’t positively contribute to happiness, and it didn’t negatively contribute to it.

With this study, we wanted to find out whether it is primarily the quantity or the quality of our social encounters that matter for one’s well-being.”

For the study, small recording devices were used to capture snippets of everyday conversation from 486 volunteers.

Professor Mehl explained the difference between small talk and a substantive conversation in their study:

“We define small talk as a conversation where the two conversation partners walk away still knowing equally as much — or little — about each other and nothing else.

In substantive conversation, there is real, meaningful information exchanged.

Importantly, it could be about any topic — politics, relationships, the weather — it just needs to be at a more than trivial level of depth.”

Personality had no effect on how much of a happiness boost people got from deep conversations, Professor Mehl said:

“We expected that personality might make a difference, for example that extroverts might benefit more from social interactions than introverts or that substantive conversations might be more closely linked to well-being for introverts than for extroverts, and were very surprised that this does not seem to be the case.”

Although small talk was not linked to happiness, it is still necessary, said Professor Mehl:

“I think of it like this: In every pill, there’s an inactive ingredient, and it’s a nice metaphor, because you cannot have the pill without the inactive ingredient.

We all understand that small talk is a necessary component to our social lives.

You cannot usually walk up to a stranger and jump right into a deep, existential conversation because of social norms.”

Perhaps, says Professor Mehl, people could be prescribed a deep conversation as a treatment:

“I would like to experimentally ‘prescribe’ people a few more substantive conversations and see whether that does something to their happiness.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Milek et al., 2018).

Our mood clearly affects how we walk, but how does our walking style affect our mood?

It’s well-known that when we’re in a good mood, our style of walking tends to reflect how we feel: we bounce along, shoulders back, swinging our arms in style.

Sometimes, just from our gait, it’s more obvious to other people how we feel than to ourselves.

Now, a study finds that it also works the other way around: people who imitate a happy style of walking, even without realising it, find themselves feeling happier

The study had participants walking on a treadmill after looking at a list of positive and negative words.

While on the treadmill each person’s gait and posture was continuously measured and fed back to them visually.

On the screen they had to try and move a bar either one way or the other by changing their walking style.

Although they didn’t realise it, walking in a happy way made the bar move in one direction and walking in a depressed way moved it the other.

Professor Nikolaus Troje, who co-authored the study, explained:

“They would learn very quickly to walk the way we wanted them to walk.”

Afterwards, they were asked to write down as many of the positive and negative words that they’d been shown earlier.

Those who’d been walking in a happy, upbeat way remembered more of the positive words, suggesting they were happier.

The study also found that those who walked in a slumped, round-shouldered, depressed way, remembered more of the negative words.

This ties in with research on people who are depressed: they have a strong tendency to remember negative events, rather than the positive.

A bias towards recalling negative events is part of the vicious cycle that perpetuates a depressed state of mind.

Professor Troje continued:

“If you can break that self-perpetuating cycle, you might have a strong therapeutic tool to work with depressive patients.”

So: shoulders back, swing those arms, and let’s see you bounce along!

Related

• Happiness Hacks: 20 Simple Strategies For A Brighter, Joy-Filled Life (P)

The study was published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry (Michalak et al., 2015).