Just one quality conversation with a friend boosts daily well-being

Conversing with a friend just once during the day to catch up, joke around or tell them you're thinking of them can increase your happiness and lower your stress level by day's end.

These are among the results of a new study co-authored by University of Kansas professor of Communication Studies and friendship expert Jeffrey Hall.

"Quality Conversation Can Increase Daily Well-Being" was published in the journal Communication Research by Hall and co-authors Amanda Holmstrom, Natalie Pennington, Evan Perrault and Daniel Totzkay. The study was informed by and provides further support for Hall's Communicate Bond Belong (CBB) theory of relationships. Hall is the director of KU's Relationships and Technology Lab.

"This paper was an attempt to define quality communication in the context of relationships," Hall said."The types of communication we chose to study were ones shown in past research to make people feel more bonded through conversation."

There were seven:

•    Catching up
•     Meaningful talk
•     Joking around
•     Showing care
•     Listening
•     Valuing others and their opinions
•     Offering sincere compliments

Over 900 study participants from five university campuses -- before, during and after pandemic lockdowns -- were directed to engage in one of the seven communication behaviors on a single day, and then reported back that night about their feelings of stress, connection, anxiety, well-being, loneliness and the quality of their day.

As it turned out, Hall said, it didn't matter which of these quality conversations someone had. The very act of intentionally reaching out to a friend in one of these ways was what mattered most.

"One of the take-home messages of this study is that there are many paths toward the same goal," Hall said.

He said the study was also designed to explore the impact of both the quality and quantity of daily communications.

"There's a lot of good research that says the number of interactions you have as well as the quality of interactions are both associated with being a less lonely, happier and more connected person," said Hall. This study found that once is enough, but more is better. Participants who chose to have more quality conversations had better days.

"This means the more that you listened to your friends, the more that you showed care, the more that you took time to value others' opinions, the better you felt at the end of the day," he said.

"The experimental design means that it's not just people who are already having fulfilling lives who have higher-quality conversations," Hall said. "This study suggests that anyone who makes time for high-quality conversation can improve their well-being. We can change how we feel on any given day through communication. Just once is all it takes."

The study also brought in Hall's past research on different ways to connect in the era of social and mobile media. The study found high quality face-to-face communication was more closely associated with well-being than electronic or social media contact.

"If at least one of their quality conversations was face-to-face, that mattered," Hall said.

The paper also explains why quality communication makes people feel better. CBB theory claims that people use conversations with friends to help get their need to belong met.

"Across these three studies, quality conversation mattered most for connection and stress," Hall said. "This supports the idea that we use communication to get our need to belong met, and, in doing so, it helps us manage our stress."

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Was I happy then? Our current feelings can interfere with memories of past well-being

Many of us spend our lives chasing "happiness," a state of contentment that is more difficult for some to achieve than others. Research in Psychological Science suggests that one reason happiness can seem so elusive is that our current feelings can interfere with memories of our past well-being.

"Happy people tend to overstate the improvement of their life satisfaction over time, whereas unhappy ones tend to overstate the deterioration of their level of happiness. This indicates a certain confusion between feeling happy and feeling better," explained authors Alberto Prati (University College London and University of Oxford) and Claudia Senik (Sorbonne University) in an interview.

Prati and Senik analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys to investigate how our current feelings influence our memories of past happiness.

First, Prati and Senik analyzed existing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel's ongoing survey of German citizens' well-being, focusing on responses from 11,056 participants between 2006 and 2016. Each year, participants had reported how satisfied they were with their life on a scale of 1 to 10. In 2016, respondents were also asked to select one of nine line graphs that best reflected the trajectory of their life satisfaction over the past decade.

Participants' graph selections were generally reflective of their past responses, Prati and Senik wrote in the article. People who reported higher current life satisfaction were more likely to select a chart illustrating continuous improvement. People with middling satisfaction were likelier to select a chart illustrating slight improvement, and people who reported lower current life satisfaction were likelier to select a chart illustrating dips in their well-being.

"People are able to recall how they used to feel about their life, but they also tend to mix this memory with the way they currently feel," Prati and Senik said.

The researchers further investigated this trend using data from 20,269 participants in the 1997 to 2009 British Household Panel Survey. As part of the survey, respondents had reported their current life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 7 as well as whether they felt more, less, or equally satisfied as they recalled being the year before.

Around half of respondents accurately recalled how their current life satisfaction compared with their report the previous year. But, as with the German data, inaccurate recollections appeared to be influenced by current satisfaction.

These results held at the aggregate level, too. When Prati and Senik analyzed 18,589 quarterly responses to a National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies survey, they found that French participants recalled, on average, being less happy a year ago than they had actually reported on the survey.

American respondents to the 1971, 1976, 2001, and 2006 Gallup Poll Social Series demonstrated the same tendency to underreport their past happiness, with the averaged responses of 4,000 participants suggesting that Americans remembered being less happy 5 years ago than they had reported at the time.

"It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday," Prati and Senik wrote. "This recall structure has implications for motivated memory and learning and could explain why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower, and are more open to new experiences."

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Positive childhood experiences of blue spaces linked to better adult well-being

New research based on data from 18 countries concludes that adults with better mental health are more likely to report having spent time playing in and around coastal and inland waters, such as rivers and lakes (also known collectively as blue spaces) as children. The finding was replicated in each of the countries studied.

Mounting evidence shows that spending time in and around green spaces such as parks and woodlands in adulthood is associated with stress reduction and better mental health. However, we know far less about the benefits of blue spaces, or the role childhood contact has in these relationships in later life.

Data came from the BlueHealth International Survey (BIS), a cross-sectional survey co-ordinated by the University of Exeter's European Centre for Environment and Human Health. The current analysis used data from over 15,000 people across 14 European Countries and 4 other non-European countries/regions (Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and California).

Respondents were asked to recall their blue space experiences between the ages of 0-16 years including how local they were, how often they visited them, and how comfortable their parents/guardians were with them playing in these settings, as well as more recent contact with green and blue spaces over the last four weeks, and mental health over the last two weeks.

The research, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that individuals who recalled more childhood blue space experiences tended to place greater intrinsic value on natural settings in general, and to visit them more often as adults -- each of which, in turn, were associated with better mental wellbeing in adulthood.

Valeria Vitale, Lead author and PhD Candidate at Sapienza University of Rome, said: "In the context of an increasingly technological and industrialized world, it's important to understand how childhood nature experiences relate to wellbeing in later life.

"Our findings suggest that building familiarity and confidence in and around blue spaces during childhood may stimulate an inherent joy of nature and encourage people to seek out recreational nature experiences, with beneficial consequences for adult mental health."

Dr Leanne Martin, Co-author and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Exeter's European Centre for Environment and Human Health, said: "Water settings can be dangerous for children, and parents are right to be cautious. This research suggests though that supporting children to feel comfortable in these settings and developing skills such as swimming at an early age can have previously unrecognised life-long benefits."

Dr Mathew White, Co-author and Senior Scientist at the University of Vienna, said: "The current study is adding to our growing awareness of the need for urban planners and local bodies responsible for managing our green and blue spaces to provide safe, accessible access to natural settings for the healthy mental and physical development of our children.

"If our findings are supported by longitudinal research that tracks people's exposures over the entire life-course, it would suggest that further work, policies and initiatives encouraging more blue space experiences during childhood may be a viable way to support the mental health of future generations."

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