Happiness is infectious
posted in - Medical Updates, - Offbeat news, - Palmdoc |If there is anything positive about spreading something to others, it’s love, joy and happiness. In a world where evil people just want to inflict pain, suffering and even death to others based on their beliefs and ideology, it’s nice to know that we can counter this by spreading happiness.
We can, because scientists now confirm Happiness is infectious
Using statistical analysis the researchers measured how social networks were correlated with reported happiness. They found that live-in partners who become happy increase the likelihood of their partner being happy by 8%, similar effects were seen for siblings who live close by (14%) and neighbours (34%). Work colleagues did not affect happiness levels suggesting that social context may curtail the spread of emotional states.
Interestingly, it is not only immediate social ties that have an impact on happiness levels, the relationship between people’s happiness can extend up to three degrees of separation (to the friend of one’s friends’ friend). Indeed, people who are surrounded by happy people are likely to become happy in the future.
Importantly, they report that close physical proximity is essential for happiness to spread. A person is 42% more likely to be happy if a friend who lives less than half a mile away becomes happy, the effect is only 22% for friends who live less than two miles away, and this effect declines and becomes insignificant at greater distances.
The findings suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals.
The research was published this month in the BMJ (Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study BMJ 2008;337:a2338 )
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December 15th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I don’t agree totally with the second last paragraph, and esp. the last phrase that says that the effect becomes ‘insignificant at greater distances’. I guess scientists always tend to comment from a statistical point of view. Certainly the human spirit is far stronger than to meekly accept this as true, for we’ve heard of long distance relationships flourishing after a few years of online contact, though it may be difficult in the beginning. With the prevalence of online social networking, and hopefully cheaper airfare (starting with AirAsia, perhaps?), this finding may change in the near future.
I guess what they mean by ‘happiness’ is casual friendly contact, and nothing deeper than that.