http://uanews.org/node/30432 What Mehl and his team found was that, consistent with prior research, higher well-being was associated with spending less time alone and more time talking to others. Furthermore, and maybe more surprisingly, they found that higher well-being was robustly related to having less small talk and more substantive conversations. Compared with the unhappiest participants in the study, the happiest participants had roughly one-third as much small talk and twice as many substantive conversations.