Is Happiness a Kind of ESP Effect?

I read this at the New Scientist  about the research results published in British Medical Journal, which reveals that happiness can infect people across three degrees of separations.

James Fowler and his colleague Nicholas Christakis, of Boston's Harvard Medical School, made the connection by mining 53,228 social relationships between 5124 people who took part in a decades-long clinical study.

The data was collected from a study of  adults who took part in the US Framingham Heart Study that was set up to look at the risks leading to future heart disease. This research was conducted in the years between 1971 and 2003. The participants were asked to identify their relatives, close friends, place of residence, and place of work and they were followed up every two to four years. The records were then used to reconstruct and analyze their social networks. There seems to have been periodic psychological evaluations.

The highlights of the study are interesting:-

Your happiness increases by a whopping 42%  if your happy friend lives within half a mile from where you are by 34% if you a have a happy next-door neighbour by 14% if you have a sibling who lives within 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) by 8% if your partner is happy  by about 6% if you happen to know a happy friend of a friend of a friend (a $5000 income increases your happiness by just 2%- "Even people we don't know and have never met have bigger effect on our mood than substantial increases in income", says James Fowler, the political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the new study.)

Fowler and Christakis declare that each happy contact increases a person's odds of happiness by an average of 9%, while an unhappy contact decreases those odds by 7%.

So be happy, know more happy friends- but don't drop your unhappy friends- your happiness decreases by just 7%, but you are increasing his happiness by 9%.

According to the Boston Globe, Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has called the study "pathbreaking." He has decided to switch his lecture topic for the week after reading this result published in the BMJ. 

"There's been quite a lot of research on individual happiness and its determinants, but there's really been nothing rigorous until this came along about the contagion of happiness," Seligman has stated.

Studies like this are hard to believe, but the general idea that happiness generates more happiness- even people you haven't met can make you happy across the social network is really amazing.