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Edge: SOCIAL NETWORKS AND HAPPINESS By By Nicholas A. Christa...

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We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation.

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We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people

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Jeremy Bentham argued, govern our lives

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Yet we know that emotions can spread over short periods of time from person to person, in a process known as "emotional contagion."

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Might an individual's location within a social network influence their future happiness?

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We recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal

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happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

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we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

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We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people.

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Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon.

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To follow up this study, we have also been examining online social networks. Emotional clustering and contagion are so fundamentally rooted in our ancient evolutionary psychology that—we believe—they should carry over to the very modern online world of email, blogs, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

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One of our efforts has involved the examination of a group of 1,700 college students who are interconnected in Facebook.

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People who take the trouble to be in the same place, take a photograph together, upload the photograph, and label ("tag") it, almost certainly have a closer relationship with one another than the usual "friends" people indicate in online social networking sites

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they had an average of only six "picture friends"

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we coded whether the students were smiling in their profile photographs

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Notice how strongly the blue nodes and the yellow nodes cluster together, indicating large-scale structure of smiling in the online network.

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statistical analysis of the network shows that people who smile tend to have more friends

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