Happiness Shapes and Is Shaped by Social Cognition and Social Connection

Abstract

Abstract Accumulating evidence demonstrates the vital role that social cognition plays in the bidirectional relationship between happiness and social connection. Social cognitions help to shape and maintain people’s social worlds. In turn, happiness has been shown to impact the ways in which people think about their social worlds—for example, via attentional biases, recall differences, and construal tendencies—which impacts subsequent social behaviors. Accordingly, understanding the ways in which happiness and social cognition interact and successfully influence social behavior is crucial for developing ways that people can better connect and avoid loneliness. This chapter discusses relevant research on attention, construal, attributions, memory, self-esteem, emotion regulation, rumination, and gratitude. Finally, building on growing research on well-being-increasing interventions, it argues that future work can leverage current understanding of how unhealthy social cognitions can be repaired, thereby creating effective interventions that target specific social cognitions, with the aim of improving relationships and enhancing well-being.