Eavesdropping on Happiness : Well - Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive

Is the happy life characterized by shallow, happy-go-lucky moments and trivial small talk, or by reflection and profound social encounters? Both notions—the happy ignoramus and the fulfilled deep thinker—exist, but little is known about which interaction style is actually associated with greater happiness (King & Napa, 1998). In this article, we report findings from a naturalistic observation study that investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the amount of small talk and substantive conversations they have. Although the macrolevel and long-term implications of happiness have been studied extensively (Eid & Larsen, 2008; How-ell & Howell, 2008), little is known about the daily social behavior of happy people, primarily because of the difficulty of objectively measuring everyday behavior. Many behavioral measures (e.g., experience sampling, day-reconstruction method) rely on self-reports and thus cannot be used to disentangle true associations between happiness and behavior from biases or ide-alized self-views. This is especially true for evaluatively loaded behaviors, such as the substance (or lack thereof) of one's conversations. To address this difficulty, we used the Electronically a digital audio recorder that unobtrusively tracks real-world behavior by periodically recording snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their daily lives. Method Seventy-nine undergraduates (32 males, 47 females) wore the EAR for 4 days (Vazire & Mehl, 2008). The EAR recorded 30 s of sounds every 12.5 min, providing 23,689 waking recordings (M = 300 per participant). For each recording, coders identified whether the participant was alone or talking with other people, and whether the conversation consisted of small talk or substantive discussion. Small talk was defined as an uninvolved, banal conversation (i.e., only trivial information was exchanged; e.g., " What do you have there? Popcorn? Yummy! "). A substantive conversation was defined as an involved conversation of a substantive nature (i.e., meaningful information was exchanged; e.g., " She fell in love with your dad? So, did they get divorced soon after? "). See Table 1 for reliabilities of the coding. We converted the EAR codings into relative frequencies (i.e., percentage of waking recordings in which a category applied). To account for differences in number of conversations , we also computed the percentage of conversations that were small talk or substantive. Across all participants, 17.9% (SD = 15.4%) of conversations were small talk and 35.5% (SD = 24.7%) were substantive. (Some conversations fell into neither category.) Substantive conversations were significantly related to time spent socializing …