contagious happiness {or cover your mouth when you are having fun}
Friday, 5 December 2008
Today I found out that scientists have ‘provided’ what we all already knew, that happiness is contagious. NPR aired a story this morning which discusses some new research which describes the social effects of happiness.
A few interesting facts that came up; happiness spreads more easily than unhappiness, and happiness tends to cluster around those happiest people. The findings found that happiness could affect people three degrees of seperation away. Most interesting is the statistics on how likely you are to influencing someone based on your relationship.
They found that when a person becomes happy, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy themselves. A spouse experiences an 8 percent increased chance and for next-door neighbors, it’s 34 percent.
One of the last comments that was made, while discussing the affects of happiness versus unhappiness, stated that “happiness integrates groups in a way that unhappiness does not.” This comment is some what disconcerting for me, as a Christian.
Though I find this to be true, there is something very wrong about the fact that people are seeking happiness while avoiding the unhappy.
The gospel gives us a glimpse of how we are supposed to be live as new beings; we are called to rejoice with those who rejoice, but also to mourn with those who mourn (romans 12:15). I wonder if the fact that unhappiness doesn’t spread like happiness partly due to us not living the way we are supposed to. It seems that the unhappy tend to become isolated, it could be this way because they are isolating themselves or a result of our shuning them into isolation.
Secondly, the best relationships that one will gain, will be those that a formed and forged through pain and struggle. At least the picture which I was presented today, made it seem like people are for going that type of relationship. Which only adds to the evidence of the deterioration of relationships in this country of friends2.0.
I’m probably reading too much into this and I’m just totally off base. I simply wonder if the way things are, are a natural state of affairs, or is there something very wrong with these findings. Is this something we as a church should work on changing and if so how?