Positive Momentum, or Don't Worry, Be Happy

I have been trying to think of a way to express my annoyance about the negativity or doom and gloom that the media perpetuates, without sounding too negative. I felt like the perfect opportunity presented itself in the report from the NY Times and other many other news outlets about a week ago. Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, co-authored a study that talks about the idea that "happiness is more contagious than previously thought". In fact, since hundreds news outlets reported on this story, I thought I'd wait and see if there was any momentum behind the idea.

Alas, it feels like the media doom and gloom stories still outweigh the fact that 93% of people have jobs and we are heading into a season of brotherly (and sisterly) love. But I have re-looked at this news just now and found some interesting things.

Following blog links to this story by, Stephen J. Dubner, the co-author of Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything, (the bestselling really fun book about economics), I was surprised to learn that the mood of the blogosphere is being tracked in what appears to be a pseudo-scientific way through something called Moodviews: Tools for Blog Mood Analysis.

But let’s start with the Christakis/Fowler study which is fascinating all by itself. It "analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003." The most interesting finding is that the happiness of people two to three degrees away from you may have an even greater effect on your happiness. In fact, even though the researchers acknowledge that social contacts were less important to happiness than personal circumstances, friends of friends of friends can have a very important effect on your happiness.

This feels like a real insight: “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

While this is something we might expect at a sporting event or concert, this may be happening with everyday contact with your family, friends and neighbors.

On the other hand, "almost-insightful" - but perhaps somewhat more obvious is the idea that "people in the center of social networks were happier than those on the fringes. Being popular was good, especially if friends were popular too." Perhaps there is more interest in how you actually map this type of thing. I suppose that if I really studied up, I'd get the cool looking graphic, but it is not very clear to me at the moment. (I also wonder - perhaps mischievously, if this happiness idea is true for goth or emo types };-/.)

The NY Times story on the study is a good read and covers lots of ground, including things like:

• criticism of the methodology of the study by other academics (the riffing of NY Times readers is also interesting)
• the idea that unconscious signals of well-being packed more zing than conscious feelings of resentment
• the physical and temporal proximity of other happy people directly correlates to their ability to affect your happiness
• reference to "a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, (which) found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling (I'm changing my picture again, immediately following this post!!
• sadness appears to be transmitted the same way, but not as reliably as happiness
• findings that a joyful coworker did not lift the spirits of colleagues, unless they were friends

In the meantime, within the blogosphere, Moodteller has created MoodViews - or graphs of what the mood of society. Moodgrapher claims to have made a number of interesting discoveries and perhaps I am being harsh by calling their approach "a pseudo-scientific" - especially since they are using what appears to be advanced computer programming and have written papers on the subject.

Specifically, by tracking around 5000 blog posts every hour "using statistical language processing methods" and "textual features of the posts" (i.e. counting the number and percentage of times words like "happy", "sad" "excited" and at least 49 other words I counted on their site appear in blogs) they have developed a computer model that claims to track the mood of society through the web.

Now I find this very cool and fascinating that someone is looking at patterns from a mile high perspective - but wonder how they can grab words out of context and make such bold predictions as showing "the impact of global events on global moods." By going to their site, they suggest we can "Find out whether it is true that people drink more during the weekend. Observe states-of-mind with a cyclic nature; e.g., people feel energetic in the mornings and relaxed in the evening. All in all, Moodgrapher is a great tool for analyzing mass-behavior over time."

So far, the related material or discussion around this has been about researching rather than pushing out viral ideas. For instance, there’s been some suggestions by the big brain behind Freakonomics, Steven D Levitt, that employers might track the mood of their workers.

This, along with the idea that if you can search for individual words you can search for words strung together - which conspiracy theorists have suggested is how our government has been monitoring us for quite some time - feels a little worrisome.

But the whole point of this is to stop worrying so much and help spread the happiness contagion. In fact, Professor Fowler reported to the NY Times, that now that he is so conscious of the effects of his own happiness on his friends and neighbors, when heading home form work he puts on his favorite song.

As I read this in particular Saturday morning, I was struck by the fact that after meeting a few hours earlier with a large bunch of really great guys, I've been walking around today singing the Bobby McFerrin tune "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (not my favorite, but I always liked this - and I found more than 3 dozen related YouTube videos using this song) - how cool is that?!