myPersonality Research

myPersonality added the Satisfaction with Life Scale earlier this summer in collaboration with a project that Dr Richard Tunney was running for the UK National Lottery examining the connection between the number and quality of friendships that people have and their satisfaction with life. In myPersonality, the Scale allows you to quantify how happy they are with your life, to compare this to other people including your friends and the general population, and then suggests areas that research has suggested to concentrate on in order to improve your score.

The results of the research project (from other sources as well as myPersonality) have been released today, which show that having 10 or more old friends is more likely to give you a higher satisfaction with life score, but that increasing this number is not so likely to help. This suggests that people should spend time cultivating their oldest and closest friendships.

There is coverage of this in various news outlets including: The Daily Mail, The Sun, PhysOrg.com

Just in case you wondered whether myPersonality’s research was stalled, I can assure you it is not! We’ve been looking at some more substantial questions than the ones already answered here. These take some time to analyse, and then we’re looking towards academic publication which usually requires that findings haven’t already been published elsewhere (including here). However, the plan is to put research findings on this blog as soon as we can, and we’re pretty excited about what we’ve been able to look at already.