Being Social in Youth Is Linked to Adult Happiness

Good social relationships in your youth might translate to happiness as an adult, while doing well in school seems to have little influence on well-being later in life, new research suggests.

The study is based on 32 years’ worth of data for 804 people who participated in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (DMHDS) in New Zealand. Craig Olsson, of Deakin University in Australia, and a research team mined this survey for clues to the childhood and adolescent origins of well-being in adulthood.