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Study: Smile, and the world smiles,
too
LONDON - When you're smiling, the whole world really does smile
with you.
A paper being published today in a British medical journal
concludes that happiness is contagious - and that people pass
on their good cheer even to total strangers.
American researchers who tracked more than 4,700 people in
Framingham, Mass., as part of a 20-year heart study also found
the transferred happiness is good for up to a year.
"Happiness is like a stampede," said Nicholas Christakis, a
professor in Harvard University's sociology department and
co-author of the study. "Whether you're happy depends not just
on your own actions and behaviors and thoughts, but on those of
people you don't even know."
While the study is another sign of the power of social
networks, it ran through 2003, just before the rise of social
networking Web sites like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook.
Christakis couldn't say for sure whether the effect works
online.
"This type of technology enhances your contact with friends, so
it should support the kind of emotional contagion we observed,"
he said.
Christakis and co-author James Fowler, of the University of
California in San Diego, are old hands at studying social
networks. They previously found that obesity and smoking habits
spread socially as well.
For this study, published in the British journal BMJ, they
examined questionnaires that asked people to measure their
happiness. They found distinct happy and unhappy clusters
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significantly bigger than would be expected by chance.
Happy people tended to be at the center of social networks and
had many friends who were also happy. Having friends or
siblings nearby increased people's chances of being upbeat.
Happiness spread outward by three degrees, to the friends of
friends of friends.
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.
Christakis and Fowler estimate that each happy friend boosts
your own chances of being happy by 9 percent. Having grumpy
friends decreases it by about 7 percent.
But it also turns out misery don't love company: Happiness
seemed to spread more consistently than unhappiness. But that
doesn't mean you should drop your gloomy friends.
"Every friend increases the probability that you're at the
center of a network, which means you are more eligible to get a
wave of happiness," Fowler said.
Being happy also brings other benefits, including a protective
effect on your immune system so you produce fewer stress
hormones, said Andrew Steptoe, a psychology professor at
University College London who was not involved with the
study.
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 Stanley
Wasserman, an Indiana University statistician who studies
social networks.
The study was only conducted in a single community, so it would
take more research to confirm its findings. But in a time of
economic gloom, it also suggested some heartening news about
money and happiness.
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," Christakis said. "Being around happy
people is better."
by By Maria Cheng - Associated Press -
Updated: 12/05/2008 07:18:07 AM CST
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Source:
http://www.twincities.com/ci_11141381?source=most_emailed
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