Happiness Can Be Contagious!

Life Extension puts out another good newsworthy piece again:
http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=7660&Section=AGING&source=DHB_090101&key=Body+ContinueReading

Happiness Just Might Be Contagious
International Herald Tribune
12-08-08
How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends' friends' friends are, even if you don't know them at all.
And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse's mood.
So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years - happiness is more contagious than previously thought.
"Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don't even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you," said Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. "There's kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence - they are not just an individual phenomenon."
In fact, said his co-author, James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, their research found that "if your friend's friend's friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket."
The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others - spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and coworkers - from 1983 to 2003.
"It's extremely important and interesting work," said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study.
Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.
Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, questioned whether the study proved that people became happy because of their social contacts or some unrelated reason.
Kahneman said that unless the findings were replicated, he could not accept that a spouse's happiness had less impact than a next- door neighbor's.
A study also published Friday in BMJ, by Ethan Cohen-Cole, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Jason Fletcher, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, criticizes the methodology of the Christakis-Fowler team, saying that it was possible to find what look like social-contagion effects with conditions like acne, headaches and height but that contagion effects go away when researchers include environmental factors that friends or neighbors have in common.
"Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects," the dissenting authors say.
In an interview, Christakis said that criticism and the acne- headache study's methods were flawed.
An accompanying BMJ editorial about the two studies called the Christakis-Fowler study "groundbreaking," but said "future work is needed to verify the presence and strength of these associations."
The team previously published studies concluding that obesity and quitting smoking were socially contagious.
But the happiness study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, is unusual in several ways. Happiness would seem to be "the epitome of an individualistic state," said John Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago's Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, who was not involved in the study.
And what about schadenfreude or its opposite, good old-fashioned envy when a friend lands a promotion or wins the marathon?
"There may be some people who become unhappy when their friends become happy, but we found that more people become happy over all," Christakis said.
Cacioppo said that suggests that unconscious signals of well- being pack more zing than conscious feelings of resentment.
"I might be jealous of the fact that they won the lottery," he said, "but they're in such a good mood that I walk away feeling happier without even being aware that they were the site for my happiness."
The subtle transmission of emotion may explain other findings, too. In the obesity and smoking cessation studies, friends were influential even if they lived far away. But the effect on happiness was much greater from friends, siblings or neighbors who lived nearby.
The BMJ study used data from the federal Framingham Heart Study, which began following people in Framingham, Massachusetts, after World War II and ultimately followed their children and grandchildren. Beginning in 1983, participants periodically completed questionnaires on their emotional well-being.