A happy life is filled with earnest talks

TUCSON, March 5 (UPI) -- A happy life is social and conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial, U.S. researchers suggest.

Psychological scientists Matthias R. Mehl, Shannon E. Holleran and C. Shelby Clark from the University of Arizona, along with Simine Vazire of Washington University in St. Louis, investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the types of conversations in which they tend to engage.

Volunteers wore an unobtrusive recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder for four days and the devices recorded 30 seconds of sound every 12.5 minutes, yielding a total of more than 20,000 recordings.

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.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more time talking to others.

The happiest participants spent 25 percent less time alone and 70 percent more time talking than the unhappiest participants. 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 in which they took part.

The happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants.