Happiness is contagious

A new study from Britain is out and making the rounds on news sites around the world. The conclusion, happiness is contagious! This seems to be obvious. If you are around people who are happy, you should find yourself to be generally happy also. Their happiness rubs off on you. What's interesting about this latest study, is that the happiness that rubs off on you, may not be just from your friend, but from your friend's friend. That is, there is a rippling effect, a six degrees of happiness, so to speak, that spreads the happiness around. In a way, they are saying that you can pay your happiness forward, to use another analogy. What's good about this finding is that it can help us stay happy, even when we are surrounded by unhappy people for a short time. Think about it. We choose our friends and most of our acquaintances. If we are happy, we would generally expect to surround ourselves with other happy people. But we cannot choose our family, and depending on the size of the business or office we work in, we cannot choose the people we work with (unless you are the one doing the hiring). We can choose the church we attend, but not the other people that attend there also, although once we become members or regular attenders, we can choose the people within that church, that we want to hang around with, and they will tend to be those that are like or similar to us (in most cases). So if you have some family members that are not pleasant to be around, or find yourself working with a bunch of jerks, you can still maintain your happiness because you have friend's who are happy and your friends have friends who are happy! I guess the question is, and this may become another future study: do UNhappy people like or want to surround themselves around other unhappy people? Stay tuned. Question? Who pays for these studies? People who are happy or unhappy?