Wired Science News for Your Neurons Previous post Happiness and Sadness Spread Just

[Warrior74]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/contagious-emotions/

There may be a literal truth underlying the common-sense intuition that happiness and sadness are contagious.

A new study on the spread of emotions through social networks shows that these feelings circulate in patterns analogous to what’s seen from epidemiological models of disease.

Earlier studies raised the possibility, but had not mapped social networks against actual disease models.

“This is the first time this contagion has been measured in the way we think about traditional infectious disease,” said biophysicist Alison Hill of Harvard University.

Data in the research, in the July 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society, comes from the Framingham Heart Study, a one-of-a-kind project which since 1948 has regularly collected social and medical information from thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Earlier analyses found that a variety of habits and feelings, including obesity, loneliness, smoking and happiness appear to be contagious.

In the current study, Hill’s team compared patterns of relationships and emotions measured in the study to those generated by a model designed to track SARS, foot-and-mouth disease and other traditional contagions. They discounted spontaneous or immediately shared emotion — friends or relatives undergoing a common experience — and focused on emotional changes that followed changes in others.

In the spread of happiness, the researchers found clusters of “infected” and “uninfected” people, a pattern considered a “hallmark of the infectious process,” said Hill. “For happiness, clustering is what you expect from contagion rates. Whereas for sadness, the clusters were much larger than we’d expect. Something else is going on.”

Happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

Patterns fit disease models in another way. “The more friends with flu that you have, the more likely you are to get it. But once you have the flu, how long it takes you to get better doesn’t depend on your contacts. The same thing is true of happiness and sadness,” said David Rand, an evolutionary dynamics researcher at Harvard. “It fits with the infectious disease framework.”

The findings still aren’t conclusive proof of contagion, but they provide parameters of transmission rates and network dynamics that will guide predictions tested against future Framingham results, said Hill and Rand. And whereas the Framingham study wasn’t originally designed with emotional information in mind, future studies tailored to test network contagion should provide more sophisticated information.

Both Hill and Rand warned that the findings illustrate broad, possible dynamics, and are not intended to guide personal decisions, such as withdrawing from friends who are having a hard time.

“The better solution is to make your sad friends happy,” said Rand.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/contagious-emotions/#ixzz0yGXxSgLA

 

[kingsam]

this book...
Connected: Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Connected-Amazing-Power-Social-Networks/dp/000734743X

it really brings to home how important it is to surround yourself wiht people who ADD value
- knowing too many afc's = bad
- knowing too many fatties = bad

 

[Rogue]

This can probably be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology. There is the social contagion because we humans are social primates who need to acted with coalitionary solidarity. We have empathy, for instance, to feel each other's feelings, to collectively aide when a fellow tribe member was injured and to stay in harmony with emotions of the tribe. It also promotes reciprocal altruism and cooperation which are vital components of survival.

 

[Warrior74]

Probably shouldn't have had a drink before I tried to post that. Epic thread title fail.