Happiness is Key to a Longer Life. Factors Influencing Happiness
Live longer sharing and receiving happiness – Happiness is contagious. You may catch it up from a passerby
Catching happiness from the street – Be happy and the world will be happy with you.
James Fowler from Californian University of San-Diego and Nicholas Christakis from Harvard medical school, using the data from Framingham research analyzed the cheerful mood and social life of 4739 people between 1983 and 2003 years.
We know that the happiness of a person depends very much on the mood of people around him. Besides that, the present research proved that unknown people may also influence your state of mind.
The result of studies proved the following. If you have a happy friend, he is capable to share with you about 15%. If his acquaintance is in a cheerful mood (even if you don’t know that person) you will be 6% happier. In other words the mood of any person around has and influence on other people.
The distance has and important role.
Close friends, that lives near by and which are happy, increase your mood by 25%. Friends that live a few kilometers away from you don’t have such an influence.
Even communication through internet with your closest friends does not have the capacity to cheer you up as well as, for example, a neighbor you meet, while taking out the garbage.
“It means that life is much more localized, that we think” – state Mr. John F. Halliwell, a Canadian scientist for perspective researches. “Modern technologies allow us to communicate with people who are in different parts of the world, but the real influence on someone’s cheerful mood is characterized by local relations”.
Sitting in an office with a happy man does not mean necessarily the fact that we will “contaminate” with his happiness. The research proved that there is no connection between the cheerful spirits of co-workers. The authors of research suppose that:”Society creates an environment of good mood transmission from human to human. But the collegial relations may not always be a favorable environment.”
The scientists also discovered why a neighbor may cheer you up better than your sister which lives in another city, miles away from you.
Why the results of this research are so important?
The results of this research constitute an engine for the further analysis of human cheerful mood properties. It is possible that, on analyzing the conditions in which happiness emerges, we will be able to create for our self positive spirits.
So try to communicate with interesting, happy people and also try to be a happy man for sharing with your happiness with others.
Have you ever noticed that your friend’s mood influence yours and have you ever caught happiness from a passerby?