Study says happiness transfers from person to person

[BridgeTheGap]

LONDON — A paper being published Friday 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."

Although the study is a sign of the power of social networks, it ended in 2003, just before the rise of social networking Web sites such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. Christakis couldn't say for sure whether the effect works online.

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.

http://www.kentucky.com/216/story/616367.html

[frogcycle]

1. I would be happy to give certain folks some "happy" n/t

[LaurenG]

2. I always thought so

I was a very sad younger person for about a year and when people were nice/cheerful it seemed to make the whole world a bit brighter. I am happy that someone studied this.

[silverweb]

3. OK, I like that.

Spread the happy!

[groovedaddy]

4. Here's the NY Times article on the same study

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/health/05happy-web.ht...

[Celebration]

5. Donovan was right!

Happiness runs in a circular motion
Thought is like a little boat upon the sea.
Everybody is a part of everything anyway,
You can have everything if you let yourself be.

[BridgeTheGap]

6. They call it mellow yellow? ;-> n.t

[I Have A Dream]

7. I see it as similar to throwing a rock into a pond.

The ripples go on and on...