Title: Friends Use Different Strategies to Help Others Struggling with Happiness Versus Meaningfulness
Stream: General Psychology
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Brian Haas, University of Georgia, United States
Abstract:
Social relationships are critically important and influential to wellbeing. Although large amounts of research shows that healthy interpersonal relationships are essential to wellbeing as a generalized construct, the mechanisms through which friends help others improve specific aspects of wellbeing are currently not well understood. Across three independent studies (N = 1176), we investigate the way friends help others improve wellbeing when the goal is specified to be either happiness versus meaningfulness and the role of temporality on the type of helping strategies friends use to help others. We found that the strategies friends use to help others improve their happiness versus meaningfulness were dissociable, and that temporality served to differentiate between happiness and meaningfulness in several ways. People associate happiness more with thinking about the present and associate meaningfulness more with thinking about the future and predict it will take a longer duration of time for a friend low in meaningfulness to improve as compared to a friend low in happiness. Lastly, we found that individual differences in time orientation explained, in part, the type of strategies people use to help a friend who is struggling with wellbeing as a generalized construct. People who view time using a longer and more holistic perspective are more apt to use meaningfulness-based strategies to help a friend low in wellbeing than people who view time using a shorter and more narrow perspective of time. These findings underscore the importance of good friends to building and sustaining different aspects of wellbeing throughout the lifespan.
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