Do Your Part, Be Happy

This week, I posted my Facebook status as “Nicolette had a good day.”  A few friends responded with comments and a client emailed me to tell me that it was just what she needed to lift her spirits.  Then last evening, Berit of Articulated Impact posted her FB status as “listening to giggles from the other room.” Strangely, it made me happy to think of her at the Affinity Lab giggling!

With all the doom and gloom it the news, it may seem harder to find something to smile about, but a report out this week sheds some light on my Facebook findings.

Political scientist James Fowler of UC San Diego and sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School set out to evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks.  They mapped out the social networks of 4,739 people and measured their happiness from 1983 to 2003 by asking how strongly four statements described them: “I felt hopeful about the future”; “I was happy”; “I enjoyed life”; and “I felt that I was just as good as other people.” Their results were reported in The Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network and published online in BMJ

In this week’s Lab Notes post Happiness is Contagious?, Sharon Begley of Newsweek explained the findings.

On average…for every one happy friend in your social network, your own chance of being happy rises by 9 percent. Every unhappy friend decreases your chance of being happy by 7 percent. Not surprisingly, the fewer degrees of separation between you and a happy person the stronger their influence on your own mood. Being friends with a happy person makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy; having a friend who is a friend of a happy person makes you 10 percent more likely to be happy, and having a friend whose friend’s friend is happy makes that 6 percent.

Something tells me Karen Salmansohn’s book – How to Be Happy, Dammit! — is going to be flying off the shelves this week!