Your happiness is influenced by other people. The influence is far stronger than you might like to believe. In other words, our moods can brighten, thanks to someone we haven’t even met.
Research has proved that happiness isn’t just an individual phenomenon but is like an emotional virus. Much like the common cold, we can catch happiness too, from friends and family members. When just one person in a group became happy, researchers were able to measure a three-degree contagion of that person’s cheer in the rest of the group. Simply put, your good mood today could be because of your happy friends, your friends’ friends, and your friends’ friends’ friends.
“People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon,” concludes the study which looked at nearly 5,000 individuals over 20 years.
Medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and political scientist James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, who pioneered this new work, pored over the social networks of 4,739 people with data from the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing cardiovascular study. Participants in that study listed contact information for their closest friends, family members and neighbours, connecting the pair of researchers to more than 50,000 social connections.
To analyse the cheeriness of the study participants, they mapped the group from 1983 to 2003 by asking how strongly four statements described them: ‘I felt hopeful about the future’; ‘I was happy’; ‘I enjoyed life’; and ‘I felt that I was just as good as other people’. The 60% of people who scored high on all four questions were rated as happy, while the rest were designated unhappy.
They found that when someone gets happy, that person’s friend experiences a 25% increased chance of becoming happy. A friend of that friend experiences a nearly 10% chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6% increased chance.
The same team had earlier demonstrated obesity and smoking behaviour also reverberate through social networks.
The three degrees of happiness contagion that the researchers found is dependent on the distance factor, though. Fowler and Christakis found that the increase in happiness only affects friends who live within a mile away from each other. “A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6km) and who becomes happy, increases the probability that a person is happy by 25%. Similar effects are seen in co-resident spouses (8%, derived from 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, derived from 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, derived from 7% to 70%),” the researchers say. All these indicate the importance of physical proximity. The strong influence of neighbours suggests that the spread of happiness might depend more on frequent social contact than deep social connections. Yet, they found no effect of the happiness of co-workers on each other, suggesting that the social context might moderate the flow of happiness from one person to another.
The emotional effect decays with time and with geographical separation, they conclude. So, the less you’re in contact with somebody, the less likely you are to catch their happiness. The data also showed that people with the most social connections — friends, spouses, neighbours, relatives — were also the happiest. Each additional happy person makes you happier.
So if obesity, smoking and now happiness spread like ravenous viruses, is sadness contagious as well? Not really, say researchers. Fortunately, they do not see enough evidence to suggest that it is time to dump our sad friends. Sadness spreads too, but much less efficiently, says Dr Fowler. His team is examining the spread of depression, loneliness, and drinking behaviour as well.
The current findings on cheer are also consistent with previous work on the evolutionary basis of human emotions and with work focusing on the fleeting direct spread of emotions.
The significance of this research stems from the fact that happiness has been proved to have an important effect on reduced mortality, pain reduction and improved cardiac function. A better understanding of how happiness spreads can thus help us learn how to promote a healthier society.
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