Happiness can be infectious, and now researchers from the University of California San Diego say they can document it. By looking at years of data collected from the Framingham Heart Study, researchers looked at self-reported happiness ratings and found out that happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. The study found that you are 15% more likely to be happy if a direct connection is happy, 10% if a friend of a friend is happy, and 6% if it’s a friend of a friend of a friend. Sadness, too, can spread, albeit more slowly.Read more and share your opinion.
Tags: contagious, framingham, happiness, heart, sadness
Dr. Steven Chang, the author of DailyDose, is a staff physician with Kosmix RightHealth. Dr. Chang practices Family Medicine at the University of California Davis Medical Center, where his medical interests include both pediatric and geriatric care, public health, gay and lesbian health, and sleep medicine. Dr. Chang trained at the Stanford University affiliated O'Connor Hospital, and was a research fellow at the National Institute of Health. He holds an M.D. from McGill University and a BA in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.