Social life is important for mental health: hearing from friends makes them happy.
“Several studies show that maintaining social connections is good for our mental and physical health”, said Peggy Liu, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States. However, despite its importance, many people drastically underestimate how happy their friends and family can be to receive a call, message, email or letter from them. This was revealed by a study published in the journal Journal of Personality and Social Psychologycarried out by researchers from the American University.
More than 5,900 attendees
As part of this work, scientists tried to understand why some adults lose sight of each other and fail to reconnect. To find out, they conducted a series of experiments involving more than 5,900 participants to determine how well they were able to accurately estimate how much others would appreciate a contact attempt.
Half of the volunteers were asked to remember the last time they contacted someone close to them “just to make up for lost time”. The other adults must have remembered a similar situation where someone came to them. They then rated on a seven-point scale how much the contacted person appreciated the gesture, felt grateful, felt grateful, or was pleased with the contact. In other experiments, participants sent a short message and a small gift to someone in their social circle that they hadn’t interacted with in a while.
Appreciation and Recognition
According to the results, people who remembered “reaching out” to someone close to them thought that the little attention they remembered was significantly less appreciated than those who received a message or a call. Participants who took the initiative to get in touch with their friend or family member were grateful and felt happy after this contact.
In all experiments, the adults initiating the communication grossly underestimated how much the recipients would appreciate their act. “We found that people who received the message or call placed more emphasis on the element of surprise. This increased importance of surprise was associated with greater appreciation,” said Peggy Liu, in a statement.
“Misplaced hesitations”
Despite their desire to reconnect, many adults are reluctant to do so, because initiating social contact after a long time can seem daunting. People fear how such a gesture could be received. “This study suggests that their hesitations may be misplaced, as others are likely to appreciate being contacted more than you think. physics, we hope these results will encourage more people to reach out to those they have lost touch with.” can we read in the conclusions of the work.
