Remember the children’s song that says “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands?”  A new scientific study says that even when friends of our friends’ friends are happy, there’s cause for applause.  Seems happiness is contagious and we share the happiness of others, even when we don’t even know them.

Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis says the happiness of people “two and three degrees removed” contributes to our own sense of well-being and their happiness can keep our own emotions uplifted for as long as a year.  Christakis, a social scientist/physician at Harvard Medical School, and James H. Fowler, associate political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, published the results of their happiness study in the December 5 issue of ‘BMJ,’ one of Great Britain’s most prominent medical journals.

These two should know a little bit about happiness.  They’ve been studying it for more than 20 years.  They tapped into the Framingham Heart Study to routinely explore the levels of happiness of 4,739 people from 1983 to 2003.  The heart study, begun just after the end of World War II and named after the Massachusetts town in which it’s centered, involves many people who know each other and the people they know and the people they know, too.  This multi-layered host of friends and strangers, representing about 50,000 social ties, revealed some interesting findings:

• A happy neighbor next door (but not further down the block) has a bigger influence, by 34%, on an individual’s happiness than even the happiness of that same individual’s spouse.  The further away the neighbor, the lower the individual boost of happiness.
• If something good happens to the friend of a friend of a friend, it can make a person happier longer than handing that person $5,000.
• Over the course of the 20-year study, when a previously not-so-happy study participant reported now being happy, more of this person’s friends and their friends down the line reported being happy, too.
• Having happy co-workers didn’t affect an individual’s disposition unless the co-workers were considered friends, too.
• People closer to the center of a happy social network are happier than those closer to the fringes of that same network.
• Facebook profiles featuring a smiling person have more friends associated with their page and, in their own profile photos, these friends are smiling more often than not.
• Friends and extended network contacts experience another person’s happiness only when that happy person experienced something joyful during the previous year.  If many friends get married in the same year, the happiness of the individual in common is passed along to his or her social network for about a year.  For longer lasting happiness, urge your friends to marry one at a time, over the course of many years.

According to the researchers, happiness is spread through people who share the same time and space.  To illustrate this theory, they cite the recent emergence of video-teleconferencing, a practice thought at one time to foreshadow the end of extensive business travel.  This didn’t happen.  Business travel is still in full swing, possibility because of an evolutionary need to be in the presence of or to actually touch another person in order to establish a bond of trust between the two parties.

Every social network includes some sour grapes and every scientific study has its share of critics.  Don’t dump them, says the researchers.  Spread your happiness their way instead.

And perhaps follow the lead of Fowler, who says he now listens to his favorite, happy, music during his commute home.  He always knew his disposition affected his wife and son but now he’s aware that his own happiness also affects his son’s friends and his mother-in-law, too.

Source: NYT