Family or Friends: Who's the Key to Your Happiness?

Spending quality time with your friends may actually make you happier than getting together with your family. However, it's important to create opportunities for positive experiences with your romantic partners and children to mentally savor those positive times. Hudson's research reveals that people report higher levels of well-being while hanging out with their friends than with their romantic partners or children. In fact, being around romantic partners predicted the least amount of happiness among these three groups, shows a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This finding was concerned more about the actual activity than person it is performed with. Probably because people enjoy being around with friends and doing fun activities than being around with family, who occasionally find themselves together doing unpleasant tasks like caretaking duties.

"Our study suggests that this doesn't have to do with the fundamental nature of kith versus kin relationships. When we statistically controlled for activities, the 'mere presence' of children, romantic partners, and friends predicted similar levels of happiness. Thus, this paper provides an optimistic view of family and suggests that people genuinely enjoy their romantic partners and children," he said.

Around 400 or more study participants were asked to reminisce the old times spent with their friends or family and rate whether thinking about the activities they had shared with them, made them emotional, happy and content. Each emotion was rated from 0 to 6.

This information and other responses about how study participants felt at different times allowed Hudson and his co-authors, Richard E. Lucas and M. Brent Donnellan, to estimate rates of happiness with their friends and family. Lucas and Donnellan are both from Michigan State University.

People usually perform activities like socializing, eating and relaxing with their romantic partners and almost the same with their friends, too. They do a lot more of these fun activities and less unpleasant activities like house work when with their friends. 65 percent of experiences with friends involved socializing, but only 28 percent of the time shared with partners.

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The activity that people reported most often with their offspring - childcare - was viewed positively. And overall, people report feeling similar levels of well-being while in the presence of friends, partners, and children once the activity was taken out of the equation.

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Source-Medindia