How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.
A study being published Friday in a British medical journal concludes that happiness is contagious and that people pass on their good cheer even to total strangers.
The study says, when you’re smiling, the whole world really does smile with you.
For this study, published in the British journal BMJ, American researchers examined questionnaires that asked people to measure their happiness. They found distinct happy and unhappy clusters significantly bigger than would be expected by chance.
American researchers who tracked more than 4,700 people in Framingham, Mass., as part of a 20-year heart study also found the transferred happiness is good for up to a year.
Rising of social networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook have also increased happiness among people but the study suggests that this type of technology enhances your contact with friends, so it should support the kind of emotional contagion we observed.
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