英语原文

Your happiness could be contagious

Study shows friends and even strangers benefit from your cheery mood

Feeling inexplicably cheery today? Thank your friends. And your friends’ friends. And your friends’ friends’ friends.

New research shows that happiness isn’t just an individual phenomenon; we can catch happiness from friends and family members like an emotional virus. When just one person in a group becomes happy, researchers were able to measure a three-degree spread of that person’s cheer. In other words, our moods can brighten thanks to someone we haven’t even met.

“Especially in the United States, we’re very used to thinking of ourselves as rugged individuals. But even very small things that happen to us have big impacts on dozens and hundreds of other people,” says James Fowler, a University of California, San Diego, political scientist, who co-authored the study with Harvard University medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. “The things that we do and the things that we feel are going to reverberate throughout our social network.”

On average, every happy person in your social network increases your own chance of cheer by 9 percent — and the effects of catching someone else’s happiness lasts up to one year. The study, which looked at nearly 5,000 individuals over 20 years, was published online Thursday in the British Medical Journal.

Fowler and Christakis were able to map the social networks of 4,739 individuals with data from the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing cardiovascular study. Participants in that study listed contact information for their closest friends, family members and neighbors, connecting the pair of researchers to more than 50,000 social ties. Fowler and Christakis have used that data set for similar studies published in the last two years that showed how obesity and smoking cessation can spread throughout a social network. The researchers used the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Index — a standard set of questions psychologists use to measure happiness — to analyze the cheeriness of the study participants. They found that when someone gets happy, that person’s friend experiences a 25 percent increased chance of becoming happy. A friend of that friend experiences a nearly 10 percent chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6 percent increased chance of happiness.

That means a stranger’s good mood can do more to lift your spirits than a $5,000 raise, which only increased happiness 2 percent, Fowler and Christakis found.

“Happiness is a social emotion. It's an emotion that we derive from social events, and very typically and it becomes important for cementing the social connections we have with others,” says Jack Dovidio, a Yale University social psychologist who was not involved in the study. “Happiness is not simply about me.”

What’s more, all these happy people could be helping to keep each other healthy. Several recent medical studies have linked happiness and health, including a 2006 Carnegie Mellon University study that found buoyant personality types catch fewer colds than downers. And a 2001 University of Kentucky at Lexington study used the handwritten autobiographies of 180 Catholic nuns to judge the effect of happiness on longevity: The nuns who used more positive words to describe their lives lived about 10 years longer than those who used more negative words to describe their lives.

“It does appear possibly to be a causal affect — that being happier actually makes you healthier,” Fowler says.

But it seems you can’t catch happiness over the phone. Fowler and Christakis found that the increase in happiness only affects friends who live within a mile away from each other. “For emotions, it appears that distance is really important,” Fowler says. “Friends who are close have an affect; friends who are far away don’t. The less you’re in contact with somebody the less likely you are to catch their happiness.”

The one-mile finding in the study is sure to sound odd to close friends who may live across town from each other. But Fowler says the key seems to be in how frequently you see your friends and those living closest saw each other the most often. (He says when they looked at the effect of happiness on friends who lived more than a mile apart, the results were too inconsistent to be anything more than chance.)

Sadness isn't as catching

On the flip side, if you’re feeling blue, you’ve only yourself to blame. Sadness doesn’t infect a social group as reliably happiness does, researchers found. Within some friendship networks, sadness had a significant effect on the members of the group, but on others, the effect was very small.

“With sadness, rather than pulling you in to your social network you often push people away,” says Emory University psychologist Nadine Kaslow, who wasn’t involved in this study. “Even though we know social support is really good for us when we’re sad, when we need it the most, we tend to push people away.” It might be a matter of private, personal emotions versus those that are meant to be shared. Anger, for example, might be another outward emotion that would spread within a group the same way happiness does, suggests Dovidio.

“When we are close to somebody, we actually have kind of a merging of our self image,” Dovidio says. And an infectious case of cheer can help cement connections within a group of friends, he adds, because it can re-affirm how close those relationships are.

“People often get a sense of happiness, even though they don't know where it comes from; it's probably very likely to come from the happiness of other people,” Dovidio says. “If I can't locate where my happiness came from it's likely that it came from another person.”

Once Fowler realized how far-reaching his own good cheer actually is, he has begun to make some changes to ensure he’s in a chipper mood more often. Lately, in the evenings on the drive home from work, just before pulling up to his house, he turns on a tune that’s almost too happy: Hoku’s “Perfect Day.” By the time he gets home, he has a giddy, goofy mood to match the pop song, and he hopes that his happiness will rub off on his two boys, 8-year-old Lucas and 6-year-old Jay.

“I’m not just going to make my sons happy — I could potentially make my sons’ friends happy,” Fowler says. “These little things I thought I was doing for myself turn out to be for hundreds of people.”

你的微笑是开心的传染源

研究表明你的朋友甚至是你身边的陌生人都可能会是你愉快心情的受益者

今天你有无比开心过吗？那谢谢你的朋友吧。还有你朋友的朋友，甚至你朋友的朋友的朋友。

新的研究表明快乐不只是个体现象；我们可以像感染传染病一样从朋友和家庭成员那里感染快乐。当群体中至少一个人变得快乐的时候，研究人员发现这个人的快乐情绪至少可以感染3级。换句话说就是我们的快乐心情可能要归功于我们甚至不曾谋面的那个人。

“尤其是在美国，我们经常习惯的认为我们是一个独立的个体，但是发生在我们身上鸡毛蒜皮的小事都可能对我们身边一打人甚至上百个人产生巨大的影响”圣地亚哥，加利福尼亚大学的政治学者James Fowler说。他曾经和哈福大学的医学社会学家Nicholas Christakis共通研究了这个课题。“我们的所作所为所感都会通过我们的社会关系网蔓延开来”

平均来说，每一个你社会网中的快乐份子都可能增加你9%的快乐指数-而且这种快乐会持续一年之久。这项研究对5000个个体进行了将近20年的观察，并把观察结果发表在了一个英国在线的医学杂志上面。

Fowler和Christakis参考伯明翰心脏研究中心的一项心血脏研究数据绘出了4739个个体的社会关系网图，这项研究的参与者罗列出了他们最亲近的朋友，家庭成员和邻居的相关信息，并组合成了超过50000条的社会链。Fowler和Christakis利用这些数据进行了相似的研究并在两年前发表了。研究表明了肥胖和戒烟是如何通过社会网来扩散的。研究者利用了传染病研究的核心对象-抑郁指数-这个在心理学上用来衡量幸福指数的因素来分析参与者的快乐程度。他们发现当一个人变得快乐，这个人的朋友就有可能提高25%的快乐指数。这个人朋友的朋友可能提高接近10%的快乐度，而这个人朋友的朋友的朋友可能提高将近5.6%的快乐度。

Fowler和Christakis发现，一个陌生人的愉悦心情有可能比$5000带给你的快乐感还要高。

耶鲁大学的社会心理学家Jack Dovidio虽然没有参加这项研究，但是他说“快乐是一种社会情绪，这种情绪是从社会现象中衍生出来的并具有代表性。它在把我们和其他人衔接起来的过程中变得越来越重要，快乐对我来说并不简单。”

还有就是，这些快乐的人对于其他人的健康还有很大的帮助。很多最新的医学研究都表明快乐对健康是有影响的，包括2006年卡内基大学的一项研究表明有着开朗性格人更不容易患感冒。在肯塔基州列克星敦的2001大学还研究了180位修女的自传手稿，用来判断快乐是否对一个人的寿命有影响；研究发现，在自传里用更多积极乐观的词描绘自己人生的修女比那些用消极悲观的词描绘自己人生的修女寿命多了大概10年。

Fowler说“看起来越快乐越健康，他们确实成了因果关系”

但是貌似你无法从电话交谈中获得快乐。Fowler和Christakis发现一个人的快乐只能影响到和他距离不超过一里的人。“对于情绪来说，距离有着很大的影响”Fowler说“关系越亲密越互相影响，相反则不然。你接触的人越少，你就越不容易从别人那里获得快乐”

所谓的“一里理论”意在证实那些住在不同城市的密友之间的关系。但是Fowler说，这关键要看和那些住在一起可以经常见面的人比起来，身处异地的你和你朋友之间到底多久见一次面(他说他们在看那些快乐指数对距离超过一里的人之间如何影响的时候发现结果由于偶然性很大导致结果非常不一致)

伤情绪不是那么容易传染的

另一方面，如果你觉得郁闷，那你只有自我承受的份儿。因为研究人员发现悲伤情绪不会像快乐那样通过社会关系传播的，在朋友圈里悲伤会对这个圈子的其他人有很大的影响，但是他向外扩散的效果很小很小。

当你悲伤时，与其把自己放到人群中你更愿意让自己远离人群”没有参与这项研究的来自Emory大学的心理学家Nadine Kaslow说“即使我们明白来自社会的支持可能是我们战胜悲伤的最大武器，但是每每在我们需要这种支持的时候我们却偏偏喜欢让自己脱离人群。”这也许是个相当隐私的问题。有时候你愿意与大家分享的情感与你的实际情绪可能正好相反。(此句如何翻译寻求帮助！！)举例来说，愤怒，与欢乐一样能感染一个团体。Dovidio说。

Dovidio说：“当我们接纳一些人的时候，我们时常带有一些主观因素。而快乐的蔓延可以使一个朋友圈的关系更加融合因为他这能让我们更肯定我们的关系是多么的密切。”

“人们总是能感觉到快乐的，即便他们有时候不知道这种快乐之源来自于哪里。它极有可能是来自于其他人。如果我无法找到我的快乐来自于哪里我会认为它来自于其他人”Dovidio说。

当Fowler意识到他的快乐原来可以传播如此之远的时候，他开始更频繁的想方设法让自己处在愉快的心情当中。最近，在下班回家的路上，他通常都会打开收音机收听Hoku的“Perfect Day”这首曲子。快到家时，他就会用欢快轻松的心情来配合这首POP，并且他希望他能把自己的快乐传染给他的两个儿子-8岁的Lucas和6岁的Jay。