Yes, It's Catching | Discovery News Video .Dec. 5, 2008 -- When you're smiling, the whole world really does smile with you.
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."
Related Content: While the study is another sign of the power of social networks, it ran through 2003, just before the rise of social networking Web sites like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. Christakis couldn't say for sure whether the effect works online.
"This type of technology enhances your contact with friends, so it should support the kind of emotional contagion we observed," he said.
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.
For this study, published in the British journal BMJ, they examined questionnaires that asked people to measure their happiness. They found distinct happy and unhappy clusters significantly bigger than would be expected by chance.
Happy people tended to be at the center of social networks and had many friends who were also happy. Having friends or siblings nearby increased people's chances of being upbeat. Happiness spread outward by three degrees, to the friends of friends of friends.
Happy spouses helped, too, but not as much as happy friends of the same gender. Experts think people, particularly woman, take emotional cues from people who look like them.
Christakis and Fowler estimate that each happy friend boosts your own chances of being happy by 9 percent. Having grumpy friends decreases it by about 7 percent.
But it also turns out misery don't love company: Happiness seemed to spread more consistently than unhappiness. But that doesn't mean you should drop your gloomy friends.
"Every friend increases the probability that you're at the center of a network, which means you are more eligible to get a wave of happiness," Fowler said.
Being happy also brings other benefits, including a protective effect on your immune system so you produce fewer stress hormones, said Andrew Steptoe, a psychology professor at University College London who was not involved with the study.
But you shouldn't assume you can make yourself happy just by making the right friends.
"To say you can manipulate who your friends are to make yourself happier would be going too far," said Stanley Wasserman, an Indiana University statistician who studies social networks.
The study was only conducted in a single community, so it would take more research to confirm its findings. But in a time of economic gloom, it also suggested some heartening news about money and happiness.
According to the research, an extra chunk of money increases your odds of being happy only marginally -- notably less than the odds of being happier if you have a happy friend.
"You can save your money," Christakis said. "Being around happy people is better."
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The science of happiness
By Mike Rudin
Series producer, The Happiness Formula
A new six-part BBC series, starting this week, looks at the newest research from around the world to find out what could it be that makes us happy.
We all want to be happy but the problem has always been that you can't measure happiness.
Happiness has always been seen as too vague a concept, as Lord Layard, Professor of Economics at the LSE and author of "Happiness - lessons from a new science" points out.
"There is a problem with the word happiness.
"When you use the word happy, it often has the sort of context of balloons floating up into the sky or something frivolous."
Now scientists say they can actually measure happiness.
Neuroscientists are measuring pleasure. They suggest that happiness is more than a vague concept or mood; it is real.
Measuring happiness
Social scientists measure happiness simply by asking people how happy they are.
It is argued that what a person says about their own happiness tends to tally with what friends or even strangers might say about them if asked the same question.
Most people say they are fairly happy.
The leading American psychologist Professor Ed Diener from the University of Illinois, told The Happiness Formula that the science of happiness is based on one straightforward idea:
"It may sound silly but we ask people 'How happy are you 1-7, 1-10?
"And the interesting thing is that produces real answers that are valid, they're not perfect but they're valid and they predict all sorts of real things in their lives."
One type of measurement even tries to record people's levels of happiness throughout the day wherever they are.
Ecological momentary assessment uses hand held computers.
The person being quizzed is bleeped and then taken through a questionnaire.
"The measures are not perfect yet I think they are in many ways as good as the measures economists use," said Professor Diener.
It is a remarkable claim. Simply by asking people, we have a measure of happiness that is as good as the economists' measure of poverty or growth.
And if true, governments could be judged by how happy they make us.
An adviser to the Prime Minister, David Halpern, told us that within the next 10 years the government would be measured against how happy it made everybody.
Power of happiness
Happiness seems to have almost magical properties.
We have not got proof, but the science suggests it leads to long life, health, resilience and good performance.
Scientists work by comparing people's reported happiness and a host of other factors such as age, sex, marital status, religion, health, income, unemployment and so on.
In survey after survey involving huge groups of people, significant correlations between happiness and some other factors are repeated.
At the moment scientists cannot prove causation, whether for example people are healthy because they are happy, or whether people are happy because they are healthy.
However, psychologists have been able to identify some very strong links.
According to Professor Diener the evidence suggests that happy people live longer than depressed people.
"In one study, the difference was nine years between the happiest group and the unhappiest group, so that's a huge effect.
"Cigarette smoking can knock a few years off your life, three years, if you really smoke a lot, six years.
"So nine years for happiness is a huge effect."
Richer but no happier
Happiness researchers have been monitoring people's life satisfaction for decades.
Yet despite all the massive increase in our wealth in the last 50 years our levels of happiness have not increased.
"Standard of living has increased dramatically and happiness has increased not at all, and in some cases has diminished slightly," said Professor Daniel Kahneman of the University of Princeton.
"There is a lot of evidence that being richer... isn't making us happier"
The research suggests that richer countries do tend to be happier than poor ones, but once you have a home, food and clothes, then extra money does not seem to make people much happier.
It seems that that level is after average incomes in a country top about £10,000 a year.
Scientists think they know the reason why we do not feel happier despite all the extra money and material things we can buy.
First, it is thought we adapt to pleasure. We go for things which give us short bursts of pleasure whether it is a chocolate bar or buying a new car.
But it quickly wears off.
Secondly, it is thought that we tend to see our life as judged against other people.
We compare our lot against others. Richer people do get happier when they compare themselves against poorer people, but poorer people are less happy if they compare up.
The good news is that we can choose how much and who we compare ourselves with and about what, and researchers suggest we adapt less quickly to more meaningful things such as friendship and life goals.
What makes us happy?
According to psychologist Professor Ed Diener there is no one key to happiness but a set of ingredients that are vital.
First, family and friends are crucial - the wider and deeper the relationships with those around you the better.
It is even suggested that friendship can ward off germs. Our brains control many of the mechanisms in our bodies which are responsible for disease.
Just as stress can trigger ill health, it is thought that friendship and happiness can have a protective effect.
According to happiness research, friendship has a much bigger effect on average on happiness than a typical person's income itself.
One economist, Professor Oswald at Warwick University, has a formula to work out how much extra cash we would need to make up for not having friends.
The answer is £50,000.
Marriage also seems to be very important. According to research the effect of marriage adds an average seven years to the life of a man and something like four for a woman.
The second vital ingredient is having meaning in life, a belief in something bigger than yourself - from religion, spirituality or a philosophy of life.
The third element is having goals embedded in your long term values that you're working for, but also that you find enjoyable.
Psychologists argue that we need to find fulfilment through having goals that are interesting to work on and which use our strengths and abilities.
Unhappiness
However, there are also many things we experience in life that can produce lasting unhappiness.
Professor Ed Diener identifies two key events which can have lasting effects.
After the loss of a spouse it can take several years to regain the previous level of well-being.
The loss of a job can affect a person for years even they are back to work.
So if you are born grumpy are you always going to be grumpy?
The question of whether we can actually use our knowledge of what makes us happy to lift our levels of happiness permanently is hotly debated by psychologists.
According to the positive psychologist Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania it is possible to lift our biological set range of happiness, at least to some extent if we work at it.
"The best you can do with positive emotion is you can get people to live at the top of their set range.
"So I think you've got about 10 to 15% leverage but you can't take a grouch and make him giggle all the time."
The first episode of The Happiness Formula was shown on BBC Two at 1900 BST on Wednesday.
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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/4783836.stm
Published: 2006/04/30 01:40:12 GMT
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