Is Happiness Contagious?
You are who your friends are when it comes to happiness.
This was the finding of a recent study at Harvard University: happiness is contagious! Not only does your friend’s level of happiness affect yours, but your friend’s friend’s happiness will influence your level of happiness. Three degrees of happiness! This means that, just like a virus, happiness can spread through social networks, and your mood could influence the happiness of someone you’ve never even met…
The happiness of more than 4,700 participants in the study was measured over a 20-year period. People were asked to report how often they experienced certain feelings during the previous week: “I felt hopeful about the future,” I enjoyed life,” and “I felt that I was just as good as other people.”
Then each person’s social network was recreated by a computer program. Connects were drawn between parents, spouses, siblings and children. Then information was gathered about “close friends,” neighbours, and coworkers. All of these social ties were used to create one big map of connectedness combined with the information about each subject’s measured happiness. The study showed that the closer the social contact, the greater the chance of happiness being spread.
This study’s finding immediately raised many eyebrows amongst researchers. But this wasn’t the first time this “contagious phenomenon” had been published. A little more than a year earlier researchers found that obesity can spread via social connections, especially when it came to close friendships.
The thinking behind the study was that here is a tendency of people who become obese to influence the behaviour of those close to them as they convey overtly or subliminally that it is all right to be over weight. And the friends didn’t have to see each other frequently or even live in the same city to have this effect!
You will not be able to spend the rest of your life avoiding unhappy people, but it might be a good idea to spend your time with those who have a cheerful disposition and are up beat about life. Happy people are doing something right, so by surrounding yourself with these people who “get it” means an increased change that good things will happen to you, too. (Adapted from Ian K. Smith, “Happy”)