A smile really is infectious, researchers happily announced on Thursday.
The team has conducted a study that shows that the more joyful people you are acquainted with, the larger the chance is that you will be happy.
“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton.
“What we are dealing with is an emotional stampede,” added Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School.
“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.”
Christakis and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, used information from the 4,700 children of volunteers at the Framingham Heart Study, a huge health investigation conducted in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1948.
They evaluated an individual’s happiness be giving subjects a straightforward, four-question test.
“People are asked how often during the past week, one, I enjoyed life, two, I was happy, three, I felt hopeful about the future, and four, I felt that I was just as good as other people,” Fowler said.
The 60 percent of people who rated extremely well on all four questions were labeled as happy, while the rest were determined to be unhappy.
“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,” stated Christakis.
People who are deemed socially connected to friends, spouses, neighbors, and relatives, were also the happiest, the data indicated. “Each additional happy person makes you happier,” Christakis said.
“Imagine that I am connected to you and you are connected to others and others are connected to still others. It is this fabric of humanity, like an American patch quilt.”
Every individual person hypothetically sits on a singular-colored patch. “Imagine that these patches are happy and unhappy patches. Your happiness depends on what is going on in the patch around you,” Christakis stated.
“It is not just happy people connecting with happy people, which they do. Above and beyond, there is this contagious process going on.”
Furthermore, cheerfulness is extra contagious instead of unhappiness, they revealed.
“If a social contact is happy, it increases the likelihood that you are happy by 15 percent,” Fowler noted. “A friend of a friend, or the friend of a spouse or a sibling, if they are happy, increases your chances by 10 percent,” he added.
“But every extra unhappy friend increases the likelihood that you’ll be unhappy by 7 percent,” Fowler said.
The findings are incredibly interesting, are also useful, too Fowler added.
“Among other benefits, happiness has been shown to have an important effect on 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,” he said.
In another study that will be released on Friday in the British Medical Journal, Ethan Cohen-Cole, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Jason Fletcher, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, disapprove of the methods used by the Christakis-Fowler team.
They say that while it is possible to connect social contagion effects with physical conditions like acne, headaches and height, this kind of contagion effects diminish when researchers take into account environmental issues that friends or neighbors have in common.
“Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects,” the authors state.
An supplementary BMJ editorial covering the two studies called the Christakis-Fowler study “groundbreaking,” but added that “future work is needed to verify the presence and strength of these associations.”
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