時尚雙語:你的微笑會讓“好心情”傳染給身邊的人
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.”
你的微笑是開心的傳染源
研究表明你的朋友甚至是你身邊的陌生人都可能會是你愉快心情的受益者
今天你有無比開心過嗎？那謝謝你的朋友吧。還有你朋友的朋友，甚至你朋友的朋友的朋友。
新的研究表明快樂不只是個體現象；我們可以像感染傳染病一樣從朋友和家庭成員那裏感染快樂。當羣體中至少一個人變得快樂的時候，研究人員發現這個人的快樂情緒至少可以感染3級。換句話說就是我們的快樂心情可能要歸功於我們甚至不曾謀面的那個人。
“尤其是在美國，我們經常習慣的認爲我們是一個獨立的個體，但是發生在我們身上雞毛蒜皮的小事都可能對我們身邊一打人甚至上百個人產生巨大的影響”聖地亞哥，加利福尼亞大學的政治學者James Fowler說。他曾經和哈福大學的醫學社會學家Nicholas Christakis共通研究了這個課題。“我們的所作所爲所感都會通過我們的社會關係網蔓延開來”
平均來說，每一個你社會網中的快樂份子都可能增加你9%的快樂指數-而且這種快樂會持續一年之久。這項研究對5000個個體進行了將近20年的觀察，並把觀察結果發表在了一個英國在線的醫學雜誌上面。
Fowler和Christakis參考伯明翰心臟研究中心的一項心血髒研究數據繪出了4739個個體的社會關係網圖，這項研究的參與者羅列出了他們最親近的朋友，家庭成員和鄰居的相關信息，並組合成了超過50000條的社會鏈。Fowler和Christakis利用這些數據進行了相似的研究並在兩年前發表了。研究表明了肥胖和戒菸是如何通過社會網來擴散的。研究者利用了傳染病研究的核心對象-抑鬱指數-這個在心理學上用來衡量幸福指數的因素來分析參與者的快樂程度。他們發現當一個人變得快樂，這個人的朋友就有可能提高25%的快樂指數。這個人朋友的朋友可能提高接近10%的快樂度，而這個人朋友的朋友的朋友可能提高將近5.6%的快樂度。
Fowler和Christakis發現，一個陌生人的愉悅心情有可能比$5000帶給你的快樂感還要高。
耶魯大學的社會心理學家Jack Dovidio雖然沒有參加這項研究，但是他說“快樂是一種社會情緒，這種情緒是從社會現象中衍生出來的並具有代表性。它在把我們和其他人銜接起來的過程中變得越來越重要，快樂對我來說並不簡單。”
還有就是，這些快樂的人對於其他人的健康還有很大的幫助。很多最新的醫學研究都表明快樂對健康是有影響的，包括2006年卡內基大學的一項研究表明有着開朗性格人更不容易患感冒。在肯塔基州列剋星敦的2001大學還研究了180位修女的自傳手稿，用來判斷快樂是否對一個人的壽命有影響；研究發現，在自傳裏用更多積極樂觀的詞描繪自己人生的修女比那些用消極悲觀的詞描繪自己人生的修女壽命多了大概10年。
Fowler說“看起來越快樂越健康，他們確實成了因果關係”
但是貌似你無法從電話交談中獲得快樂。Fowler和Christakis發現一個人的快樂只能影響到和他距離不超過一里的人。“對於情緒來說，距離有着很大的影響”Fowler說“關係越親密越互相影響，相反則不然。你接觸的人越少，你就越不容易從別人那裏獲得快樂”
所謂的“一里理論”意在證實那些住在不同城市的密友之間的關係。但是Fowler說，這關鍵要看和那些住在一起可以經常見面的人比起來，身處異地的你和你朋友之間到底多久見一次面(他說他們在看那些快樂指數對距離超過一里的人之間如何影響的時候發現結果由於偶然性很大導致結果非常不一致)
傷情緒不是那麼容易傳染的
另一方面，如果你覺得鬱悶，那你只有自我承受的份兒。因爲研究人員發現悲傷情緒不會像快樂那樣通過社會關係傳播的，在朋友圈裏悲傷會對這個圈子的其他人有很大的影響，但是他向外擴散的效果很小很小。
當你悲傷時，與其把自己放到人羣中你更願意讓自己遠離人羣”沒有參與這項研究的來自Emory大學的心理學家Nadine Kaslow說“即使我們明白來自社會的支持可能是我們戰勝悲傷的最大武器，但是每每在我們需要這種支持的時候我們卻偏偏喜歡讓自己脫離人羣。”這也許是個相當隱私的問題。有時候你願意與大家分享的情感與你的實際情緒可能正好相反。(此句如何翻譯尋求幫助！！)舉例來說，憤怒，與歡樂一樣能感染一個團體。Dovidio說。
Dovidio說：“當我們接納一些人的時候，我們時常帶有一些主觀因素。而快樂的蔓延可以使一個朋友圈的關係更加融合因爲他這能讓我們更肯定我們的關係是多麼的密切。”
“人們總是能感覺到快樂的，即便他們有時候不知道這種快樂之源來自於哪裏。它極有可能是來自於其他人。如果我無法找到我的快樂來自於哪裏我會認爲它來自於其他人”Dovidio說。
當Fowler意識到他的快樂原來可以傳播如此之遠的時候，他開始更頻繁的想方設法讓自己處在愉快的心情當中。最近，在下班回家的路上，他通常都會打開收音機收聽Hoku的“Perfect Day”這首曲子。快到家時，他就會用歡快輕鬆的心情來配合這首POP，並且他希望他能把自己的快樂傳染給他的兩個兒子-8歲的Lucas和6歲的Jay。
