Amidst the holiday season, researchers from Harvard Medical School bring good tidings. Your happiness may be largely influenced by the happiness of those around you - even if they are strangers, according to a new study published online December 4, 2008 in BMJ

Amidst the holiday season, researchers from Harvard Medical School bring good tidings. Your happiness may be largely influenced by the happiness of those around you - even if they are strangers, according to a new study published online December 4, 2008 in BMJ .

Using participants from the Framingham Heart Study, the researchers measured the happiness of 4739 individuals in order to evaluate whether happiness could spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness could form within social networks. They found that emotional states could be transferred directly from one person to another, through both direct and indirect relationships. People who were surrounded by many happy people and those who were central to their social networks were more likely to become happy in the future. For example, when an individual became happy, a friend living within a mile experienced a 25% increased chance of also becoming happy and a next-door neighbor experienced a 34% increased chance. Interestingly, co-workers were not affected.

Happiness is a fundamental component of human existence; in fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) has increasingly emphasized happiness as a component of health and well-being. The findings of this study suggest that, rather than simply being a product of one's own experiences or choices, happiness is actually a collective social phenomenon.

Source

BMJ. 2008;337:a2338