I know- there's just so much bad news out there. But keeping a positive attitude does more than just help YOUR mood! Read on...
Happiness is contagious, new study finds
By Judith Graham |Tribune staff reporter- 6:21 PM CST, December 4, 2008
You
may think your attentive spouse, your loving children, and your good
friends are what make you happy. But something else may be going on:
The people they're connected with are making you happy too.
So suggests a new study proposing that happiness is transmitted through
social networks, almost like a germ is spread through personal contact.
The research was published Thursday in BMJ, a British medical journal.
It's the latest in a growing body of work investigating how our social
connections--neighbors, friends, family, co-workers, fellow congregants
at church and other associates--affect us. The premise is that we live
in a social environment that shapes what we do and how we think and
feel.
"We've known for some time that social relationships are the best
predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is
much more powerful than anyone realized," said Daniel Gilbert, author
of "Stumbling on Happiness" and a professor of psychology at Harvard
University.
Previous research by the authors, James Fowler of the University of
California-San Diego, and Dr. Nicholas Christakis at Harvard, has
concluded that social networks influence obesity and tobacco use by
altering perceptions of acceptable weight and desirable behavior.
Now they've turned their attention to the emotional realm, exploring
how social ties influence our moods and our sense of well-being. Their
primary finding: People who are surrounded by happy people are more
likely to be happy themselves. And it's not only people in our
immediate circles who make a difference--it's the people surrounding
the people we know.
Imagine several pebbles thrown into a pool of water that send ripples
outward, said Fowler, an associate professor of political science. Each
pebble represents a happy person and the waves the impact of that
person's mood on others. This impact, his study found, extends through
several degrees of separation, to the friends of a person's friends.
Some experts question whether the researchers' statistical methodology
can support that conclusion. It's difficult to sort out cause and
effect in this kind of research and the authors may not have done so
with enough rigor, said Charles Manski, a Northwestern University
economics professor who studies how inferences can be drawn from social
interactions.
He asks, is it that one person's happiness makes another person happy,
or could it be that another factor experienced by both people is
affecting both?
Say two friends are watching a TV show together, and one laughs after
the other does, Manski said. It may look like the first person's
chuckle is the cause of the second, but the jokes on the TV show might
inspire both reactions.
Christakis said his research factored out such mutual influences. The
study asked the subjects--4,739 participants in the famous Framingham
Heart Study in Massachusetts--to complete a survey including four
questions relating to happiness three times between 1983 and 2003. They
also provided information about social contacts, which allow
researchers to map their connections.
The study found that happy people form clusters and the happiest people are those most centrally located in the clusters.
"If you imagine the fabric of humanity as a patchwork quilt, it turns
out if you're happy or not depends on if you're in a happy or unhappy
patch," Christakis said.
"We postulate that people who are in closer, more frequent contact with
each other are more susceptible to catching each other's moods," Fowler
said.
The researchers stress that personal factors such as jobs or marriages
also affect happiness and that, although happiness may fluctuate,
people tend to return to a personal happiness "set point" over time. It
is this relatively stable emotional condition they examined in the
paper, not the fleeting moods people experience day to day.
Richard Suzman, director of the division of behavior and social
research at the National Institute on Aging, said the line of research
holds "enormous promise in helping us improve interventions aimed at
helping people change behaviors and improving public health."
Such interventions may involve targeted programs designed to alter
social networks that influence behavior. The institute on aging has
provided funding for Fowler and Christakis' work.
An editorial accompanying the report in BMJ called its conclusions
"intriguing" but advised caution. Framingham, a relatively small
community, may prove unique in ways not yet understood, wrote Peter
Sainsbury, director of population health in Sydney South West Area
Health Service in Australia.
As for whether unhappiness is also spreadable, Fowler and Christakis
plan to look at that topic in upcoming papers on loneliness, depression
and social networks.
