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Abstract

It is often assumed that there is a robust positive symmetrical relationship between happiness and social behavior: Social relationships are viewed as essential to happiness, and happiness is thought to foster social relationships. However, empirical support for this widely held view is surprisingly mixed, and this view does little to clarify which social partner a person will be motivated to interact with when happy. To address these issues, we monitored the happiness and social interactions of more than 30,000 people for a month. We found that patterns of social interaction followed the hedonic-flexibility principle, whereby people tend to engage in happiness-enhancing social relationships when they feel bad and sustain happiness-decreasing periods of solitude and less pleasant types of social relationships that might promise long-term payoff when they feel good. These findings demonstrate that links between happiness and social behavior are more complex than often assumed in the positive-emotion literature.

Discussion

Our findings challenge the notion that happiness and social behavior relate to one another in a simple reciprocal and symmetrical fashion. Whereas our large-scale investigation of everyday life confirms that relationships with people who are close are crucial to happiness, we also demonstrate that happiness relates to people’s social behavior in more complex ways than previously acknowledged. As we predicted using the hedonic-flexibility principle, people seek happinessenhancing social relationships when they feel bad and are more likely to sustain happiness-decreasing periods of solitude or engage in less pleasant types of social relationships that might promise long-term payoff when they feel good. Our data cannot directly tell us whether spending at least some portion of the time alone and regularly meeting new people predict enhanced psychological and social adjustment 5 or 10 years later. Yet research does suggest that although solitude can increase loneliness and negative affect, it may also offer opportunities for concentration, renewal, autonomy, and spirituality, which might be adaptive (Larson, 1990; Long & Averill, 2003). Likewise, a large body of work has consistently demonstrated the importance of building and maintaining strong social networks on mental and physical health (Holder & Coleman, 2007; Lee & Ishii-Kuntz, 1987; Pinquart & Sörensen, 2000).