Wash Your Hands...

As long as we're on the subject of NPR, I thought I'd share another networks story I heard this morning on NPR. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and UC San Diego recently completed a study on the nature of happiness is social networks and found that happiness tends to be contagious. The authors found that people with happy friends tended to be happier, thus creating happy social clusters. In fact, the researchers found that a person who is close to someone who becomes happy has a 25% chance of becoming happier themselves. Additionally, the authors found that happiness tends to be more contagious within social networks than unhappiness is. You can see the social network of happiness clusters on the NPR website.

Image of the happiness network from CNN story.
The nodes are colored for average mood. Yellow is
happy, blue is sad, and green is in-between.