Happiness is contagious, study finds

Happiness is contagious, researchers reported on Thursday.

　　Happiness is contagious, researchers reported on Thursday.

　　The same team that demonstrated obesity and smoking spread in networks has shown that the more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be happy.

　　And getting connected to happy people improves a person's own happiness, they reported in the British Medical Journal.

　　"What we are dealing with is an emotional stampede," Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said in a telephone interview.

　　Christakis and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, have been using data from 4,700 children of volunteers in the Framingham Heart Study, a giant health study begun in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1948.

　　They have been analyzing a trove of facts from tracking sheets dating back to 1971, following births, marriages, death, and divorces. Volunteers also listed contact information for their closest friends, co-workers, and neighbors.

　　They assessed happiness using a simple, 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 scored highly on all four questions were rated as happy, while the rest were designated unhappy.

　　People with the most social connections -- friends, spouses, neighbors, relatives -- were also the happiest, the data showed. "Each additional happy person makes you happier," Christakis said.

　　And happiness is more contagious than unhappiness, they discovered.

　　"If a social contact is happy, it increases the likelihood that you are happy by 15 percent," Fowler said. "A friend of a spouse or a sibling, if they are happy, increases your chances by 10 percent," he added.

　　A happy third-degree friend -- a friend of a friend -- increases a person's chances of being happy by 6 percent.

　　"But every extra unhappy friend increases the likelihood that you'll be unhappy by 7 percent," Fowler said.

　　(Agencies)

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