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Eavesdropping on Happiness

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; Howell & 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 idealized 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 Activated Recorder (EAR; Mehl, Pennebaker, Crow, Dabbs, & Price, 2001), a digital audio recorder that unobtrusively tracks real-world behavior by periodically recording snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their daily lives.