possibility…

Chart of happiness
The graph shows friends, spouses and siblings in 2000. Circles are females, squares are males and the lines between them indicate relationships (black for siblings, red for friends and spouses). Colors show the average happiness of a person and all of his or her social relations, with blue for sad, yellow for happy and shades of green for in-between.

Image Credit: James Fowler, UC San Diego

One of the keys to resilience is optimism and optimism is easier when you’re happy. Sounds rather circular doesn’t it? If you were happy, you wouldn’t need to bolster your resilience. In recent years, however, researchers have found that being happy is something that we can induce and now it seems that our happiness also influences others in our communities.

According to researcher James Fowler of University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School, happiness spreads far and wide through a social network–traveling not just the well-known path from one person to another but even to people up to three degrees removed.

In a December 2008 press release, Fowler said, “happiness spreads more robustly than unhappiness” and seems to have a greater effect than money. “Scientists have been interested in happiness for a long time. They’ve studied the effect of everything from winning the lottery to losing your job to getting sick, but they never before considered the full effect on other people. We show that happiness can spread from person to person to person in a chain reaction through social networks.”

“One of the key determinants of human happiness is the happiness of others,” said Christakis. “An innovative feature of our work was exploring the idea that emotions are a collective phenomenon and not just an individual one.”

Christakis and Fowler used data from the Framingham Heart Study to recreate a social network of 4,739 people whose happiness was measured from 1983 to 2003. To assess the participants’ emotional wellbeing, they relied on answers to four items from the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale: “I felt hopeful about the future”; “I was happy”; “I enjoyed life”; and “I felt that I was just as good as other people.”

The research shows that happiness loves company. Happy people tend to cluster together, and, on the surface, people with more social contacts seem generally happier. Fowler and Christakis observe, however, that what matters there is not just the total number of connections but the number of happy ones.

On average, every happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent. Each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent. Happiness, the researchers found, spreads in a social network up to three degrees of separation: You are 15 percent more likely to be happy if directly connected to a happy person; 10 percent if it’s the friend of a friend who is happy; and 6 percent if it’s the friend of a friend of a friend.

Unhappiness also spreads, but not nearly as much.

The structure of connections matters, too. “Remarkably,” said Fowler, “where we sit in the social network has a big impact on how happy we are.” According to the study, individuals’ happiness depends not only on how many friends they have but also on how many friends their friends have. In social-network terms, this is known as “centrality.” And the more central a person is–the better connected their friends
or the wider the social circle–the more likely they are to become happy. (The effect does not work the other way around: Becoming happy doesn’t widen a social circle.)

Fowler and Christakis also looked at what happens to happiness with distance. When a friend who lives within a mile becomes happy, it increases the probability a person is happy by 25 percent. More distant friends have no significant effect. Similar effects are seen in siblings who live within a mile and in co-resident spouses versus distant siblings and distant spouses. Next-door neighbors have a significant effect, 34 percent, while neighbors further away, even on the same block, do not.

“We think the spread of emotion has a fundamental psychobiological aspect,” said Christakis. “Physical personal interaction is necessary, so the effect decays with distance.” The effect also decays with time.

There are several practical implications to the work, not least of which, Fowler said, might be to take greater responsibility for your own happiness because it affects dozens of others. “The pursuit of happiness is not a solitary goal. We are connected, and so is our joy.”

The study has been published in the British Medical Journal.