Small talk is part of everyday life, but it's the deep conversations that may make you happy. That's one possibility suggested in a new study which examined how conversation is related to happiness. Researchers, led by Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona, looked at the different types of conversation that happy and unhappy people participate in. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, was somewhat small, involving 79 undergraduates, but meshes   well with established ideas that happiness and social life are connected. Experts found that the happiest people in the study engaged in 33% more small talk than the unhappiest participants . Happy people tended to have twice as many deep conversations, and spent 25 percent less time alone than the unhappiest participants. These insights   fit with what psychologists have seen previously: that loneliness leads to depression  , and that feelings of social connectedness are important for happiness, said Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the University of California, who was not involved in the study. Deep conversations create a feeling of belonging that leads to happiness, she said. On the contrary, people who suffer from depression tend to withdraw from others. The method that the researchers used was creative, Charles said. Instead of bringing people into a lab, as is traditionally done in these sorts of studies, they had participants wear a recording device for four days, picking up conversations that they had. The recorder sampled   30 seconds of sound every 12.5 minutes, giving researchers a broad range of conversations to examine in terms of "small talk" vs. "deep conversation". The bottom line is that maintaining friendships can help with emotional well-being(,). Friends buffer the effects of negative events and provide support, Charles said. Don't be too busy to have a deep conversation, she said. "It really is important. It should be something that you should pay just as much attention to as your career," she said. What can we learn from the text?
The journal Psychological Science provided financial support for the study The study was creative and different from traditional studies The participants of the study needed to be well educated The participants took off the recorder every 12.5 minute.