In Chapter 8, one of the examples features a study that found that the more "deep talk" people engage in (as measured by the EAR), the happier they reported being (Mehl et al., 2010) (see Figure 8.1).
The same 2010 study also reported that the amount of engagement in small talk was associated with lower well being (this result is presented in Figure 8.9).
Now a team of researchers (including many of the same researchers) have published a second study with similar methodology (Milek et al., in press). The team collected new data in a larger, more heterogeneous sample of U.S. adults. (the original study was only on college students.) The authors used Bayesian analytic techniques, including pooling the new samples with the sample from the 2010 study. You can view a preprint of the report here. It's in press at Psychological Science.
The new paper confirmed evidence for the "deep talk" effect. That is, substantive conversations were linked with greater well being, with a moderate effect size. But the team did not find evidence for the complementary effect of small talk. That is, in the new analysis, the estimate of the small talk was not different from zero.
If you teach this example, it's worth updating students: The "deep talk" result in Figure 8.1 has been replicated, but one of the effects in in Figure 8.9 (the small talk effect) has not.
