RESEARCH INDICATES HAPPINESS IS CONTAGIOUS
When you’re smiling, the whole world really does smile with you.
Ever wonder happy people have something that keeps them cheerful, chipper and able to see the good in everything? They have happy friends. The more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be happy.
Researchers from Harvard and the University of California reported in the British Medical Journal that happiness spreads among people like a contagious disease. The study involved nearly 5,000 people and their more than 50,000 social ties to family, friends and co-workers, found that an individual’s happiness is chiefly a collective affair, depending in large part on his or her friends’ happiness and the happiness of their friends’ friends, and even the friends of their friends’ friends. The merriment of one person can ripple out and cause happiness in people up to three degrees away. So if you’re happy, you increase the chance of joy in your close friend by 25%; a friend of that friend enjoys a 10% increased chance. And that friend’s friend has a 5.6% higher chance.
The more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be happy. And getting connected to happy people improves a person’s own happiness.
What we are dealing with is an Emotional stampede. While the study is another sign of the power of social networks but researchers couldn’t say for sure whether the effect works online.
Happy spouses helped, too, but not as much as happy friends of the same gender. Experts think people, particularly woman, take emotional cues from people who look like them.
But it also turns out misery doesn’t love company. Happiness seemed to spread more consistently than unhappiness. But that doesn’t mean you should drop your gloomy friends.
Being happy also brings other benefits, including a protective effect on your immune system so you produce fewer stress hormones – reduced mortality, pain reduction, and improved cardiac function. So better understanding of how happiness spreads can help us learn how to promote a healthier society.
But you shouldn’t assume you can make yourself happy just by making the right friends.
To say you can manipulate who your friends are to make yourself happier would be going too far, said an Indiana University statistician who studies social networks.
According to the research, an extra chunk of money increases your odds of being happy only marginally – notably less than the odds of being happier if you have a happy friend. You can save your money. Being around happy people is better.
The research study also suggested that the social group is a powerful super-organism that wields much influence over individuals’ well-being. Previous analyses, based on the same pool of data, have shown that obesity is similarly contagious and so is the act of quitting smoking.
Researchers hope that a better understanding of how people pick up and pass on behaviours will help health officials create more targeted public-health messages. Anti-smoking campaigns aimed at teens, for example, might be more powerful if they were geared toward the most socially connected students in a high school – rather than individual smokers. They are always looking for areas to invest in, promising new areas of research that will give them new levels of ability to help people.
