The Wall Street Journal Column

Research just published in the Journal of Happiness Studies now reveals that when it comes to happiness, having a choice is key. People who don’t choose to be social but end up surrounded by other people rate themselves as unhappiest. In contrast, folks who opt to be social and then find themselves in the company of others were ecstatic.

“Our culture is so focused on how positive interactions can be—just think of FOMO—that we don’t consider the alternative,” said the study’s lead author Liad Uziel, a psychology professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. “If you choose to be in a social situation, then you are likely to get more out of it. But your well-being is likely to drop if you didn’t choose it.”

The study, published with fellow Bar-Ilan psychology professor Tomer Schmidt-Barad, recruited 155 university students as participants. Every time the students received a text reminder on their phones, they had to report what they were doing and with whom, if they had any control over who they were with, and how they felt about it all. As Dr. Uziel described it: “How satisfied were they—their positive and negative experiences at that moment, how meaningful they found what was going on at that time, and how much control they had over the situation they were in.” The participants were pinged three times a day for a total of 10 weekdays, which yielded a mountain of data: 4,300 status reports.

Once the numbers were crunched, the researchers discerned several patterns. When people found themselves in social environments, whether chosen or unchosen, participants’ ratings of their experiences tended to the extreme, with higher highs and lower lows. “This means that our emotions are so much more intense when we’re with other people compared to when we’re alone,” Dr. Uziel said. Participants found themselves in environments they hadn’t chosen—such as classrooms and workplaces—about 30% of the time.

Being alone is more predictable, while being with others always presents surprises, he added. He used watching a soccer game as an example: “When you are alone and your team scores a goal, it’s exciting. But it’s way more exciting if you’re with other people—you experience it more powerfully.” This doesn’t mean that time alone is to be avoided, he said; the data show that “the occasional period of time alone brings happiness to everyone, as long as that person chooses it.”

Being with others also means having an audience, which heightens the impact of any experience. Performers know this, as does anyone who has ever watched a 5-year-old learning to ride a bike. Having an audience witness your achievement feels glorious. Of course, falling off your bike repeatedly is embarrassing when there’s an audience. These are the extremes of feeling that Dr. Uziel said were typical of social situations, whether or not they were chosen.

His next project will be to look at how the pandemic has changed the meaning of social situations. “It’s a risk, even for people who like to be with others,” Dr. Uziel said. “We shouldn’t push people to socialize.”

This dictum, he suggested, should influence how we design workplaces and family homes: “Give people as much choice as possible. Because forcing social contact on people is just a source of stress.”

Jessica Salerno, a psychology professor at Arizona State University, and Michael Slepian, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, address this and other issues in a study published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Building on their own previous work and that of colleagues, they explore the nexus between secrecy and morality.

Dr. Slepian and Dr. Salerno were intrigued by the 2015 breach of the Ashley Madison website, which was created to help married people meet partners online in order to have affairs. The hackers “released all the data, which was hugely sensitive,” because they found the site morally objectionable, Dr. Slepian said. The two researchers set up a series of experiments and surveys to probe whether people were more likely to expose others’ secrets if they wanted to punish their behavior, as was the case with Ashley Madison.

Assembling nine different groups of 150 diverse participants, the researchers employed a variety of scenarios involving secrets that were hypothetical or taken from the news, or from the participants’ own experience. Some involved behavior that participants might find immoral; in a subset of those scenarios, the person committing the secret transgression had already been punished in some way. In each mini-experiment, details were subtly tweaked to see how the participants’ answers would differ. Was the secret act intentional or accidental, for example, or was anyone harmed? Participants were asked whether they supported disclosing someone’s secrets in each case.

The results showed that people were more likely to approve of spilling the beans if they found the secret behavior unethical. “The more morally outraged they felt, the more likely they were to reveal the secret,” said Dr. Salerno. In general, the moral code of the supposed confidante predicted their willingness to blab.

The secrets most likely to be revealed include specific lies (46%), harming another person or yourself (40%), illegal behavior (35%) and drug use (34%). By contrast, a confidence about a surprise event would only be revealed 18% of the time. If the secret was about someone who had already faced consequences for their behavior, a confidante would be less likely to reveal their secret because they’d already been punished, added Dr. Slepian. If the hidden behavior was unintentional, the secret was also likelier to be kept under wraps.

So how do you find a true confidant? Drawing on previous research, Dr. Slepian suggests avoiding the polite, rule-following, easy-to-offend person, especially if outgoing and loquacious; that’s the profile of someone most likely to spill the beans.

“What you really want is someone compassionate and assertive—especially if you’re looking for help—and someone who has the same sense of morality as you,” Dr. Salerno said. As she emphasized, keeping secrets is always difficult, but it’s especially hard if the shared information induces indignation or disapproval in your confidant.

There’s no need: Our bodies produce this substance already. Hexadecanal, or HEX, is one of 6,000 volatile chemicals emitted by our body secretions, like tears and sweat, and in HEX’s case, by an infant’s scalp. Chemical signals like HEX fly under our conscious radar while altering our behavior, said Noam Sobel, a professor of neurobiology at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, who calls his lab “very nose-centric.”

Two experiments—recently published in the journal Science Advances by Prof. Sobel, data scientist Eva Mishor and a team of colleagues—revealed that breathing in HEX influences our social behavior, dialing up aggression in women but attenuating it in men. This sex difference stunned the researchers. Based on mouse studies, they expected HEX to have a calming effect across the board. “Until the end of the second study I was skeptical about the results. HEX has no odor, yet our body reacts to it, and our behavior changes,” said Dr. Mishor.

The researchers made this discovery through a classic double-blind study in which 127 people were randomly assigned to an experimental or a control group, either inhaling clove oil infused with HEX or clove oil alone. Both groups played a computer-based negotiation game, believing that they were interacting with a remote opponent.

In reality the participants were playing against an algorithm that offered them egregiously unfair financial deals. “The ‘opponent’ proposes that he get 90% of a sum of money while you get 10%,” said Prof. Sobel, for example, and by the time participants reached the next phase of the experiment “they’re really mad at this person because they’re being so antisocial.”

That’s when the participants moved to a reaction-time game in which they could exact their revenge. When their “opponent” lost a round, the subject could punish them with a horn blast at different volumes, each illustrated by a face showing increasing signs of distress. “What we saw was a small but consistent difference between the HEX and the control subjects,” said Dr. Mishor. “Women exposed to HEX reacted 19% more aggressively, while men were 18.5% less aggressive.”

This was such an unexpected finding that the researchers did a second experiment. This time participants were tested while in a brain scanner. They were compared with themselves after inhaling either HEX or a dummy liquid. After being made to believe that money was being stolen from them in the game, would the same person react the same way in both conditions? Again, the women reacted with more aggression when exposed to HEX vs. the control liquid, this time by extracting more money from their “opponent” as retribution, while the men reacted less aggressively when exposed to HEX.

In the HEX condition, the men’s scans also showed greater connectivity to other areas of the brain, suggesting more neural engagement in regions that might control aggression. “We can look at the functional connectivity alone and distinguish men from women at 86% accuracy,” said Prof. Sobel.

What to make of the findings? The authors speculate that HEX is an ancient survival mechanism. Mothers exposed to the chemical signal would be more likely to defend their babies against threats, while fathers who inhale it would likely be less aggressive. Excited by the finding, Prof. Sobel thinks this is just the beginning of investigating olfaction as a driver of human aggression. “The next stage is to do this with actual babies’ heads instead of HEX in a jar.”

Worthy of its name, the varroa destructor mite carries a virus that can destroy the colony from within. But the presence of the parasite is noticed by the colony’s healthy bees, who change their behavior to limit viral transmission, according to a suite of experiments led by Michelina Pusceddu and Alberto Satta, agricultural researchers at the University of Sassari, Italy, along with colleagues at three other European universities. “Varroa destructor is among the most serious threats to honey bees world-wide and has played a fundamental role in the decline of honey bee colonies all over the Northern Hemisphere in the past decades,” they write.

It’s a scientific parable for our times: A deadly virus descends on us out of the blue and exploits our social habits to expand its territory and reproduce. We’d be goners, except that evolutionarily speaking, a social species has a couple of ways to fight back. In some social animals, like ants, chimps and gorillas, the infected animal acts first: It might move slowly and look a little mangy, or skulk off to self-isolate. Other members of the group then know to avoid it.

But in the noble honeybee, the pest’s intrusion immediately alters the behavior of the healthy forager bees, who know their colony members by smell and can distinguish between the scent of healthy nest mates and those carrying parasites. The presence of the parasite in the colony prompts them to shift their activities away from the uninfected and more vulnerable members of the hive—the queen, the babies and their nurses.

The study’s authors call this change in the healthy bees’ behavior social distancing, and they expected to see more of it in the infested hives. Their experiment consisted of observing the behavior of bees in six colonies. Half of the hives had been regularly treated with oxalic acid, a natural pesticide, to make sure they were mite-free. A varroa destructor infestation bloomed naturally in the other three hives. The researchers videorecorded what went on in the hives over three consecutive days.

Forager bees are the explorers who leave the hive to find the nectar that nourishes the colony. Upon their return, they communicate where the sweetest flowers are, how big the nectar cache is and whether more foragers are needed. They do this by executing a waggle and vibration dance in the shape of a figure eight.

The comparison among hives revealed a stark difference in the forager bees’ dances, depending on the presence of infection. When the researchers compared the varroa-infested hives with uninfested ones, they found that the number of foraging dances was the same in the two groups, but the location of the dance floor differed. In the infected hives, the foragers were more likely to stay on the perimeter of the hive. In the uninfected hives, the foragers danced and waggled to their hearts’ content in the inner sanctum.

“The frequency of dances on the outermost frames is about 70% in infested colonies, compared with 10% in the uninfested colonies. So I would say that the probability of foragers being at the outer limits of the hive in infested colonies is seven times as likely as in uninfested colonies,” wrote Dr. Satta in an email.

Even one-day-old bees changed their behavior when detecting infection around them. They groomed each other more—which removed the mites—and fed and rubbed their antennae against nest-mates less. In other words, the presence of disease changed their social habits. If one-day-old honeybees can do it, so can we.

But he’s not. We like to think that our dogs understand what we say, but the scientific evidence for true language comprehension in dogs is sparse. A few dogs are gifted. As a 2004 study in the journal Science showed, a border collie named Rico in Leipzig, Germany, could understand 200 words and execute precise verbal commands. But when all other cues are controlled for, the scientific consensus is that context, gesture and tone of voice signify much more to the average dog than human speech does.

“When it comes to lab conditions, it turns out that dogs are not good at word meanings,” said Marianna Boros, a postdoctoral researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. Most need gestures and intonations to understand. She adds: “This is also true of commands like ‘sit.’”

Them’s fighting words for many dog lovers, but Dr. Boros knows whereof she speaks. Her research group is one of several at the Budapest school that specialize in canine cognition. The researchers haven’t found evidence for word comprehension in dogs per se. But they have discovered some of its neural scaffolding, such as a right-hemisphere bias for language processing in dogs’ brains, which is opposite to that of humans. They have also shown, using functional MRI scans of brain activity, that dogs know when a word and its intonation match.

Now they have proof that dogs can pick up on the boundaries separating words while listening to speech recorded without pauses and in a monotone, according to a new study led by Dr. Boros and Lilla Magyari, to be published in the journal Current Biology next month. Not only can dogs sense where a word begins and ends, but they can compute the probability that a certain syllable will appear next, much as our smartphones predict what we will tap next in a text or email.

To get access to such arcane canine data, the researchers used brain imaging on 37 dogs; 19 were tested by electroencephalogram and another 18 were trained to jump into the MRI scanner—which they did willingly and with tails wagging—to listen to speech samples.

The dogs’ brain responses showed that they could follow two rules: They note how frequently they hear two syllables together, and they compute how likely two particular syllables are to follow each other. This hasn’t been shown in nonhuman mammals before, though it has been shown in 8-month-old infants.

Dr. Boros’s study showed that dogs use some of the same neural hardware as babies do to detect word and syllable probabilities: the basal ganglia, which supports sequential and pattern learning, and the auditory cortex, one of the areas specialized for language.

While this doesn’t mean that dogs understand the meanings of words, it tells us that recognizing the building blocks of language is not unique to humans. “It suggests that the ability to segment speech is a general mammalian capacity” that may have evolved or been acquired by dogs while living alongside humans, said Dr. Boros.

In short, our babies, our smartphones—and even our dogs—can handily detect and predict what we might say or write next. As long as none of them actually finishes my sentences or tells me to “sit,” that’s fine with me.