new study about friends

Post Reply New Topic

My dad came into my room earlier telling me about this new study he read about and how it says the more friends you have whether fake or real the happier you will be. This study seemed to say the more people you can spend time with and feel their good feelings rub onto you the happier you are. At first i was kinda bothered by it because I feel like i spend alot of time around people but it doesn't make me so much happier but than he brought up how the study discusses mirror neurons in the reason for making people happier. The questions im getting to is do these studies really correlate to aspies as well nt's, are we not supposed to listen to these statistics, and how is it that the more ppl you surround yourself with the happier you are when i cant help but feel that more drama would come up that way?

Seems like a reasonable conclusion. And the more the drama, the more the drain from being around them.
The trick then is to find friends who tend to be drama-minimal.

I saw a lecture on the University of California website that talks about mirror neurons possibly being part of the Theory of Mind difficulties in autism.

Here’s the link.

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=14663

Tell your dad that it may not apply to you since that part of your brain may not be functioning the same way it does in most people.

Now, can you find a link for me to disprove my parents theory that I just "need to get out there" or "go to church to find friends"?

It may be true that people with more friends are happier, but it seems to me that it's more likely that they have more friends because they're happier (and therefore easier to be around,) rather than that they're happier because they have more friends.

Being with people doesn't always make me happy. Sometimes, I just can't be bothered to socialise; it doesn't bother me if I spend an evening or a day completely alone and cut off from the world. I just don't have that instinct that most people have.

Hmm this hasn't been a good day.

Right, so you're more likely to not socialize BECAUSE you're unhappy.. not be unhappy because you don't socialize.

Edit: once again, we see the problem with assigning a causal relationship when we observe that two things go together, and forget that we could be mixing up cause and effect, or be seeing two effects of a common cause.