Make someone happy. No, make three someones happy...

Finally, some unqualifiedly great news. If I'm happy, you're happy, and, incredibly, your friends are happy too. In today's Boston Globe, Carolyn Y. Johnson's "New reason to be happy: It may go a long way" reports on a BMJ (British Medical Journal) study (which, by the way, you have to pay for, thus reducing your chance of pure joy):

Using comprehensive data collected on 4,739 people over two decades, the researchers studied individuals' levels of happiness and their social relationships.

A happy friend who lives within a mile, for example, boosts your odds of being happy by 25 percent, researchers found. A happy sibling within the same distance increases your probability of happiness by 14 percent.

It seems obvious that your closest friends might influence your mood, but the study found that even the happiness of a friend's friend boosts your chance of being happy by 9.8 percent. Even more surprising, the happiness of a friend of a friend of a friend boosts your chance of being happy by 5.6 percent.

Unhappiness, on the other hand, did not spread as much.

Once again, the good news comes from the Framingham Heart Study folks, including Nicholas Christakis (whose gorgeous graphs showing smoking and obesity as contagious I reported on last year while attending the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems).

It just gets better. From Reuters' "Happiness is contagious" by Maggie Fox:

They assessed happiness using a simple, four-question test.

"People are asked how often during the past week, one, I enjoyed life, two, I was happy, three, I felt hopeful about the future, and four, I felt that I was just as good as other people," [co-author James] Fowler said.

The 60 percent of people who scored highly on all four questions were rated as happy, while the rest were designated unhappy.

CONNECTIONS EQUAL HAPPINESS

People with the most social connections -- friends, spouses, neighbors, relatives -- were also the happiest, the data showed. "Each additional happy person makes you happier," Christakis said.

"Imagine that I am connected to you and you are connected to others and others are connected to still others. It is this fabric of humanity, like an American patch quilt."

Each person sits on a different-colored patch. "Imagine that these patches are happy and unhappy patches. Your happiness depends on what is going on in the patch around you," Christakis said.

"It is not just happy people connecting with happy people, which they do. Above and beyond, there is this contagious process going on."

And happiness is more contagious than unhappiness, they discovered.

So just so you, my darling readers, know. I'm really happy today. How about you? xo, j