Will happy friends stop me from feeling depressed?

A new study shows that, like yawning, laughter really can be infectious. It can even help people to recover from depression

I have just returned from Disneyland Paris, where everyone smiles whether or not they are having a good time. It was enough to make you think that smiling, like yawning, could be catching. And so it is. In 1963 an “epidemic” of laughter among girls in a boarding school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) forced it to close – although the outbreak was possibly due to mass hysteria rather than genuine mirth – while a study on the effects of a “laugh box” showed that most people laughed or smiled in response to canned guffaws.

Laughter is almost always social – occurring 30 times more often in company than in solitary situations. A study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society has taken the idea of contagious smiling one step further, by examining the effect on our own happiness of having friends who have a “healthy mood”. The researchers used American data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to do complex mathematical modelling, which the study’s author, Ed Hill, did a good job of trying to explain to me.

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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1MNLMMY
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