Is Happiness Catching?

The cover asks us to wonder whether our friends are making us fat but inside the New York Times Sunday magazine piece is another question: Is Happiness Catching?
Clive Thompson's piece looks at recent ground-breaking research on social networks and their effects on physical and emotional health. I suspect most of us will remember this from when it vaulted into media star status a few months ago with respect to obesity. Fat people often had fat friends, the reports said, and so, hmmm, did that mean that friends could actually make you fat?
At the time, I thought this seemed like a cruel place to take research on obesity. So now, overweight people have to worry their thinner friends will drop them because obesity might be "catching?" Don't they have enough public censure already?
Now I see that the research had more to do with how certain behaviors are clustered among groups. If a few in the group decide to quit smoking, for example, it can catch on and affect the health of everyone in that group. Peer pressure, I suppose.
Interestingly, the researchers also tracked emotional well-being, including happiness. Among the findings:
If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends.

and

Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. So by this logic, adding more links to your network should — mathematically — add to your store of happiness.

Well, that sounds easy. But wait. This sounds familiar. It's almost like--yes, it is exactly like the advice my grandmother always used to give (advice I always rejected). Be surrounded by friends at all times, put on a big smile and make a show of being happy. Talk about non-controversial things. Don't explore any subject too deeply. Don't ask too many questions.

This sounds harsh, I know. But when you're a depressed teenager, it just doesn't help to know that people would prefer you'd pretend to be someone else. Even though, for the good of the world, you probably should.
Besides, maybe emotional mirroring isn't the engine that drives this. Maybe cheerful people just don't want to associate with us "dry humor" types. Or maybe unhappiness clusters have more to do with some shared problem--like layoffs and downsizing. Wouldn't that account for some of the statistical clustering in the research? (Thompson quotes other skeptical researchers who think it might.)
Even so, it sounds like something interesting to try.
So let's see...How do I go about getting more friends?