Alternative Health Blog

It might sound like a catch-phrase for an optimists club, but new science shows that happiness can be contagious. Harvard Medical School researchers recently reported that the more happy people you know, the greater the chance you will be happy yourself.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, was conducted by Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard professor of medical sociology who has previously revealed that both a smoking habit and obesity are similarly contagious. If you know a lot of smokers, you are more likely to smoke yourself. Same for obesity: If you have family members, neighbors, friends and others in your community who are overweight, the likelihood rises significantly that you will be at an unhealthful weight too.

Think of it as sort of a networking or clustering effect. In the latest results on happiness, Christakis decided to turn contagious into a positive. He called a sort of “emotional stampede.” The Harvard prof has partnered with University of California-San Diego political scientist on all three studies.

"Each additional happy person makes you happier," Christakis says. "Imagine people live in patches and that these patches are happy and unhappy patches. Your happiness depends on what is going on in the patch around you.”

For his part, Fowler was willing to quantify the happiness effect of social clusters.

"If a social contact is happy, it increases the likelihood that you are happy by 15 percent," Fowler says. "A friend of a friend, or the friend of a spouse or a sibling, if they are happy, increases your chances by 10 percent."

There is a downside: "Every extra unhappy friend increases the likelihood that you'll be unhappy by seven percent.”

Picking your friends and associates can no doubt affect your health. Next up for Christakis and Fowler will considering how social clusters affect the onset and possible contagious behavior related to depression, loneliness and drinking behavor.

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.