Happy People Tend To Talk More Than Unhappy People!

Mrs. Rosenthal...yay, I'm taling to you!  Remember you were the one who put tape over my mouth most of my first grade year...You were the one that wrote on my report card that I was mentally retarded because of my mixed blood...SUCCESS is the sweetest revenge!  Guess what?  That roll of tape that had my name on it...I'm still HAPPY and now they say happy people talk more than unhappy people!  I am the happiest person in the world!!!!!!!!

Here is the full article...very fun reading...maybe we can discuss it...I sure like talking about it! LOL

Happy people tend to talk more than unhappy people, but when they do, it tends to be less small talk and more substance, a new study finds.

A group of psychologists from the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis set out to find whether happy and unhappy people differ in the types of conversations they tend to have.

For their study, volunteers wore an unobtrusive recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) over four days. The device periodically records snippets of sounds as participants go about their lives.

For this experiment, the EAR sampled 30 seconds of sounds 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.

Here's what the researchers found:

• The happiest participants spent 25 percent less time alone and 70 percent more time talking than the unhappiest participants.

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

The findings, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, suggest that happy lives are social and conversationally deep, rather than solitary and superficial.

The researchers think that deep conversations may have the potential to make people happier, though the findings from this study don't identify cause-and-effect between the two.