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      Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study

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      1 , 2 ,
      BMJ : British Medical Journal
      BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.

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          Abstract

          Objectives To evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks.

          Design Longitudinal social network analysis.

          Setting Framingham Heart Study social network.

          Participants 4739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003.

          Main outcome measures Happiness measured with validated four item scale; broad array of attributes of social networks and diverse social ties.

          Results Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.

          Conclusions People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

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          Most cited references66

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          Rapid planetesimal formation in turbulent circumstellar discs

          The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969). How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale planetesimals is a major unsolved problem (Dominik et al. 2007): boulders stick together poorly (Benz 2000), and spiral into the protostar in a few hundred orbits due to a head wind from the slower rotating gas (Weidenschilling 1977). Gravitational collapse of the solid component has been suggested to overcome this barrier (Safronov 1969, Goldreich & Ward 1973, Youdin & Shu 2002). Even low levels of turbulence, however, inhibit sedimentation of solids to a sufficiently dense midplane layer (Weidenschilling & Cuzzi 1993, Dominik et al. 2007), but turbulence must be present to explain observed gas accretion in protostellar discs (Hartmann 1998). Here we report the discovery of efficient gravitational collapse of boulders in locally overdense regions in the midplane. The boulders concentrate initially in transient high pressures in the turbulent gas (Johansen, Klahr, & Henning 2006), and these concentrations are augmented a further order of magnitude by a streaming instability (Youdin & Goodman 2005, Johansen, Henning, & Klahr 2006, Johansen & Youdin 2007) driven by the relative flow of gas and solids. We find that gravitationally bound clusters form with masses comparable to dwarf planets and containing a distribution of boulder sizes. Gravitational collapse happens much faster than radial drift, offering a possible path to planetesimal formation in accreting circumstellar discs.
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            The Framingham Offspring Study. Design and preliminary data.

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              Prospection: experiencing the future.

              All animals can predict the hedonic consequences of events they've experienced before. But humans can predict the hedonic consequences of events they've never experienced by simulating those events in their minds. Scientists are beginning to understand how the brain simulates future events, how it uses those simulations to predict an event's hedonic consequences, and why these predictions so often go awry.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: associate professor
                Role: professor
                Journal
                BMJ
                bmj
                BMJ : British Medical Journal
                BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
                0959-8138
                1468-5833
                2008
                2008
                04 December 2008
                : 337
                : a2338
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
                [2 ]Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
                Author notes
                Correspondence to: N A Christakis christak@ 123456hcp.med.harvard.edu
                Article
                fowj601310
                10.1136/bmj.a2338
                2600606
                19056788
                71070dd7-1770-4d15-a87f-c1f0c10dae16
                © Fowler et al 2008

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 10 September 2008
                Categories
                Research

                Medicine
                Medicine

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