Have you ever noticed that being around someone who’s happy and positive makes you feel happier, too? That’s not just in your head; it’s a real phenomenon known as “emotional contagion,” where one person’s emotions, like joy or sadness, can transfer to others.
James Fowler, a political science professor at the University of California, and Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard Medical School professor, studied the social connections of over 5,000 hospital patients from 1983 to 2001. Their research found that the closer someone is to a happy person, the more likely they are to feel happy too.
People whose family members or close friends were happy experienced a 15.3% increase in their own happiness. Remarkably, even when someone they had never met—such as a friend of a friend of a friend—was happy, their happiness still increased. A friend of a friend raised the happiness index by 10%, while a friend of a friend of a friend boosted it by 5.6%. Clearly, happiness is subject to emotional contagion.
If you become the kind of person who spreads happiness to your family, neighbors, and beyond, your joy can ripple outward, bringing more happiness to the world around you.