Want to Be Happy? Make Your Relationships Exceptional

Peers rated students on 32 characteristics, organized into thematically-matched

pairs (e.g., dissatisfied/complaining, optimistic/hopeful). We ran what’s called a factor analysis to see if certain characteristics tended to show up together, and we discovered three different patterns, which we called personas:

• Positive: These folks were high in positive characteristics (happy/cheerful, content/satisfied, optimistic/hopeful) and low in negative characteristics (dissatisfied/complaining, anxious/stressed, self-critical/hopeless.)
• Pro-social: These students were different from those with positive personas, in that they focused on the well-being of others or of groups, by being compassionate/nurturing, cooperative/harmonious, or forgiving/generous.
• Anti-social: This persona tended to be irritable/agitated, hostile/argumentative, or distracted/absent-minded. Anti-social students are, according to peers, consistently negative or just not as interested in nurturing other people’s happiness—relative to other people in the course, anyway.

When we compared these scores to surveys that students filled out about themselves before the course began, we found that outer persona and inner lives do tend to match up. When friends said students were doing well, students were more likely to consider themselves happy. On a darker note, results also suggest that being anti-social—more irritable, argumentative, and disinterested—does not go unnoticed. Friends tune into anti-social behavior and describe us this way. What’s more, being seen as anti-social correlates with less self-reported happiness.

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/want_to_be_happy_make_your_relationships_exceptional