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, to be 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."
Interesting stuff! You can read more here.
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2 comments:
this is really cool Zexi! Thanks for the article
I think this makes sense that people's happiness can increase your own happiness...but I think it's highly exaggerated.
"And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse's mood."
Personally I think that sadness/gloominess is more contagious. So is fear. Therefore, if your spouse is sad then I think ur happiness is overrun, not the other way around.
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