Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
According to a post on the Well blog, people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier. How much of your time do you spend having substantive conversations? With whom are you most likely to have these kinds of conversations, and what do you talk about?
“Talk Deeply, Be Happy?” describes the findings of a psychologist in Arizona:
It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.
But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.
[…]The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved 79 college students — 32 men and 47 women — who agreed to wear an electronically activated recorder with a microphone on their lapel that recorded 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.5 minutes for four days, creating what Dr. Mehl called “an acoustic diary of their day.”
Researchers then went through the tapes and classified the conversation snippets as either small talk about the weather or having watched a TV show, and more substantive talk about current affairs, philosophy, the difference between Baptists and Catholics or the role of education. A conversation about a TV show wasn’t always considered small talk; it could be categorized as substantive if the speakers analyzed the characters and their motivations, for example.
Students: If you kept an acoustic diary over a few days, how many “deep” or “substantive” conversations would it show that you have? With whom are you most likely to have these kinds of discussions, and what kinds of things do you talk about? Do you think having these kinds of conversations contribute to your overall happiness? How?