Moods spread like ripples through friends’

Believe it or not, moods are contagious and spread like ripples through friends, according to a new research.

Believe it or not, moods are contagious and spread like ripples through friends, according to a new research. An international team has carried out the research and found that people’s moods are determined not only by the state of mind of those closest to them but also by friends of their friends who they have never met.

And what’s more is that behaviour including drinking, smoking and even obesity can spread in a similar manner, the study has revealed.

They ripple through networks “like pebbles thrown into a pond”, the ‘New Scientist’ magazine’s online edition quoted lead researcher Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston as saying.

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Researchers came to the conclusion after analysing 53,228 social connections between 5,124 individuals over time. They found a happy friend increased the odds of someone being happy by 15 per cent — but that a friend of a friend boosted the chance by about ten per cent, and a friend of a friend of a friend by about six per cent.

That was triple the two per cent chance of being happier caused by a 3,500 pounds pay rise. “If you drop one pebble in a pond, it will create ripples out from the pebble. Most people will not be surprised that people with more friends are happier, but what really matters is whether those friends are happy,” Christakis said.

In fact, they also found that moods — good and bad — tended to travel more freely in same-sex groups, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

Despite physical proximity, the mood of a cohabiting partner was less than ten per cent likely to have an effect. Added co-researcher Prof James Fowler of California University: “Each ‘happy connection’ increased the chance of a person’s happiness by nine per cent and each ‘unhappy connection’ decreased it by seven per cent.”