HAPPINESS IS CONTAGIOUS...EVEN INFLUENCES YOUR NEIGHBORS! Theres been many posts of people wondering how to deal with toxic family and colleagues. All research suggests that you should distance yourself from such people. How far? Based on a 20 year longitudinal study of an entire town (Framingham), about a mile! Heres part of the abstract, and a link to the whole study. I think its one of the most important studies of the decade. Our thoughts may not be able to influence others at a distance, but our moods and emotions certainly can. As the researchers speculate: Our data do not allow us to identify the actual causal mechanisms of the spread of happiness, but various mechanisms are possible. Happy people might share their good fortune (for example, by being pragmatically helpful or financially generous to others), or change their behaviour towards others (for example, by being nicer or less hostile), or merely exude an emotion that is genuinely contagious (albeit over a longer time frame than previous psychological work has indicated). Psychoneuroimmunological mechanisms are also conceivable, whereby being surrounded by happy individuals has beneficial biological effects. The researchers add: The spread of happiness seems to reach up to three degrees of separation, just like the spread of obesity32 and smoking behaviour.34 Hence, although the person to person effects of these outcomes tend to be quite strong, they decay well before reaching the whole network. In other words, the reach of a particular behaviour or mood cascade is not limitless. We conjecture that this phenomenon is generic. We might yet find that a “three degrees of influence rule” applies to depression, anxiety, loneliness, drinking, eating, exercise, and many other health related activities and emotional states, and that this rule restricts the effective spread of health phenomena to three degrees of separation away from the ego. Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study. BMJ 2008; 337. Fowler % Christakas. RESULTS: Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation. Conclusions 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. bmj/content/337/bmj.a2338.abstract?ijkey=04a9edef580cac11259d03374b6d0c2186d5d1f9&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 20:04:26 +0000
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