This guest post is contributed by Pamelia Brown.
Positive psychology is relatively new field of study. According to a Time magazine article published a few months ago, positive psychology—the study of happiness and other positive emotions—can be codified as a science starting in the early 2000s. While the history of psychology has been a relatively short one, and its credibility has been questioned, the scientific rigor of the field has grown exponentially over the years.
One of the more interesting recent findings in positive psychology has been the idea that happiness is infectious. A Washington Post article reported about a year ago on the research of Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University, who published his paper, “The Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network,” in the British Journal of Medicine.
Although it would seem fairly obvious that when your colleague is in high spirits, or he laughs out loud, you’ll probably feel happier, too, Christakis found that happiness has an ability to profoundly penetrate a social network, even spreading for as long as a year and as far as three degrees of separation.
Christakis study was unprecedented—he and his colleagues examined about 4,700 people over a period of twenty years. They measured happiness in their subjects by asking questions about their general state of being over the past week. They found that if one person in the group was happy, then someone directly affiliated with them (i.e. a friend, a spouse, a sibling, or a neighbor) had between an 8 and 34 percent increased chance of being happy as well. If a person was located within a one mile radius—regardless of social affiliation—they, too had an increased chance of feeling happy, since it was found that happiness can spread from one social connection to another for up to three connections.
Now what does Christakis’ study mean for the average person? Although his study will certainly have wide-ranging effects for future studies in positive psychology, it also indicates to us that an important key to happiness is surrounding ourselves with other happy people. On the flipside, if we ourselves are happy, we can have the power to profoundly change a group dynamic. In the workplace, this idea is significant, considering the correlation between happy employees and productivity is strong.
Christakis noted that he did not find as great a connection between the spread of happiness and coworkers, however. Perhaps this means that our work colleagues do not form the social ties that they should. One can easily conclude, then, that cheering up at the office, reaching out to your coworker, can have a ripple effect, causing waves of happiness (and efficiency) throughout the work environment.
Pamelia Brown writes on the topics of online associate degree programs . She welcomes your comments at her email Id: pamelia.brown@gmail.com.
