Dr. Gupta, CNN's health guy and Anderson Cooper's temporary replacement (?) has an interesting article about the relationship between happiness, depression, small talk, and "substantive conversations."  A group of researchers placed recording devices on a group of subjects, and recorded snippets of their conversations for four days.  They then classified the conversations as either "small talk" or "substantive."

(The first thing that jumps out at me is, how do you define the difference between small talk and substantive conversation on a day to day basis?  It seems like there is a lot of potential for bias to creep in here.  But let's pay that no never mind and assume everything is on the up and up.)

They found that depressed people engage in more small talk than substantive conversations, and that happy people engage in more substantive conversations than small talk.

Dr. Gupta passes this off as cause and effect, perhaps light-heartedly.  His take home message is that substantive conversation indicates strong social ties, which helps bolster happiness.  And that depression indicates a weak or missing social network, which causes depression.

Now first of all, I don't think anyone gets really excited over small talk.  YEAH SMALL TALK WOOOO!!!!  At best, most people don't mind small talk.  At worst, I know a lot of people who hate it - myself included.

Personally, I got over my hatred of small talk when I finally placed it in its position as social glue.  No one gives a rat's behind about the weather, but we talk about it because we need to have some conversation to fill this space.  The conversation says "I like you, and we are on friendly terms."  It's a signal, and it performs a necessary social function.  And I don't think you're really SUPPOSED to like it.

But despite Dr. Gupta's take on it, I can think of a couple other things that could be explaining this disparity.  One is that happy people may be more able to successfully turn small talk into substantial conversation.  Like I said, no one likes small talk, and substantial conversation - by establishing a real connection with another person - makes us happy.  I think it's entirely possible that happy people are, among other things, better able to push past the shallow chit-chat.

Another alternate explanation is that people who are depressed are steering - deliberately or otherwise - away from substantial conversation.  I recently talked with a friend who suffers from clinical depression, who said that he doesn't like to engage in in-depth conversations because he doesn't want to burden people with complaints, or show them what his interior life is like, for fear that they will see him as some kind of monster.  He feels that everyone sees him as "normal," and he doesn't want to risk that impression by letting them see who he really is.

It's worth noting that this friend engages in quite a lot of substantial conversation online, with a circle of close friends he has built up over the years.  Which leads me to my third point of contention: the study only covered face-to-face conversations.  I think they would find some interesting results if they dug into people's online conversations, too.

But ultimately what it all comes down to is that meaningless chit-chat sucks.  I don't think anyone will disagree on that one!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user noway