Happiness Is a Neighbor's Smile | Gimundo | Good News... Served Daily

Happiness Is a Neighbor’s Smile

How's your next door neighbor doing these days? The question may seem random, but in fact, a neighbor's happiness may have a bigger impact on your own emotional state than even your own spouse.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on December 09 2008

How’s your next door neighbor doing these days? The question may seem random, but in fact, a neighbor’s happiness may have a bigger impact on your own emotional state than even your own spouse.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School told the New York Times. Dr. Christakis and his team recently completed a major survey of people’s happiness and emotional connections, questioning nearly 5,000 people between 1983 and 2003. Their findings were just published in the British journal BMJ.

Their research shows that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket,” said the study’s co-author, James H. Fowler, a political science professor at the University of California San Diego.

In other words, happiness is contagious—and it’s not limited to just your friends, but is linked to whatever loose connections you may see. So the old adage may be true: smile, and the whole world smiles with you. Or at least your neighborhood.

Filed under: Health and Wellbeing, Science, Weird,

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