By Jane Collingwood
Happiness is a contagious condition, medical researchers reported today.
Personal happiness depends heavily on friends, colleagues and family being happy too, according to the new study.
Professor Nicholas Christakis from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and colleagues evaluated whether happiness can spread from person to person and within social networks.
They took information from 4,739 individuals followed for 20 years as part of the Framingham Heart Study. Results showed that people who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in their network are more likely to become happy.
On the website of the British Medical Journal, the authors also report "clusters" of happy and unhappy people, which appear to result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals.
Analysis suggests that a friend who lives within a mile and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25 per cent. Happiness is also significantly affected by spouses, nearby siblings, and next door neighbours, but not by coworkers.
The experts conclude: "This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon." This "fundamental fact of existence" justifies the specialty of public health, they believe.
In the same journal, Professor Andrew Steptoe from University College London, UK, and colleagues describe the study as "groundbreaking". They write: "If happiness is indeed transmitted through social connections, it could indirectly contribute to the social transmission of health, and has serious implications for the design of policies and interventions."
They call for further studies to verify these links and identify the processes through which they operate.
Fowler, J. H. and Christakis, N. A. Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis of the Framingham Heart Study social network. The British Medical Journal, 2008;337:a2338.
Steptoe, A. and Diez Roux, A. V. Happiness, social networks and health. The British Medical Journal, 2008;337:a2781
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