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New York: 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 neighbour 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 A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, published on 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 H. Fowler, an Associate Professor of political science at University of California, 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 analysed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbours and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations. A 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 are socially contagious. But the happiness study may be more surprising. What about pleasure in someone’s misery or envy when a friend lands a promotion? “There may be some people who become unhappy when their friends become happy, but we found that more people become happy over all,” Dr. Christakis said. 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 neighbours who lived nearby. A next-door neighbour’s joy increased one’s chance of being happy by 34 per cent, but a neighbour down the block had no effect. Still, the researchers said, it is not clear if increased communication via e-mail messages and Webcams may eventually lessen the distance effect. Dr. Christakis and Professor found that when people changed from unhappy to happy in self-reported responses on a widely used measure of well-being, other people in their social network became happy too. Another finding was that a joyful co-worker did not lift the spirits of colleagues, unless they were friends. Professor Fowler believes inherent competition at work might cancel out a happy colleague’s positive vibes. — New York Times News Service
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