Health Buzz: Contagious Happiness and Other Health News

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Help your friends be Happier, and their friends, and their friends too with the first-ever Facebook Application designed to leverage Harvard research that Happiness is contagious through social networks. ruHap, The Happiness Company has introduced an application that will soon help thousands of Facebook users find Happiness every day following its successful completion of public testing and approval for inclusion in the Facebook Application Directory.
Happiness spreads through friends and family like a virus according to research published in the British Medical Journal in December. Surprisingly perhaps, Happiness spreads three levels deep, meaning that the Happiness of your friends’ friends’ friends is impacted by whether you are Happy or not. This according to research by Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard and James H. Fowler of the University of California at San Diego.
In the study your chance of being Happier increased by 15% for every Happy friend you have, 10% for every Happy friend of your friends, and even 6% for the Happy friends of the friends of your friends. ruHap’s new Facebook application was built to take advantage of this phenomenon and help Facebook's over 400 million users lead a Happy life. This has large implications as Happier people are more productive, healthy, and creative.
Users post to Facebook whether they are Happy or not thus helping their friends be Happier, and their friends, and their friends too. ruHap collects the results and publishes a Daily Happiness Index in real-time at the ruHap website. The Daily Happiness Index is also offered as a downloadable widget which provides fresh daily content for interested websites and blogs.
The Facebook Happiness app is available at http://apps.facebook.com/ruhaphappinessindex
About ruHap, The Happiness Company: ruHap helps people be Happier by bringing the leading academic Happiness research to users in small, fun, bite sized pieces. Overloaded with information, people still want to learn how to be Happier, but in a quick non-intrusive way. ruHap’s free website (http://ruhap.com/) offers extensive Happiness Resources, a Daily Happiness Quote delivered to users by email, a blog (How to be Happier at http://ruhap.com/content/category/blog/), a Facebook Happiness application that shares your Happiness (helping your friends be Happier, and their friends, and their friends too!), a daily Happiness poll and index, and much more.
ruHap’s Happiness resources include ruHap’s 14 Ways to be Happier Right Now, Stress Reduction: the ruHap Way, Happiness Background, Happiness Videos, Self Actualization by Dr. Maslow, Teacher Resources for Happiness, Happiness U., How to Get Good Grades in College, Happy Associations, and Other Happy Links. There are literally hours of the world’s best Happiness information collected and organized in one place.
ruHap enjoys Top 20 rankings for both of its Facebook offerings as well as many Happiness related Google search results.

Gregory S. Barsh of PA 3:46PM May 21, 2010

And in other news, every single person involved in this study necessarily must go F##K themself, and later become victim to a random act of violence. Death is completely acceptable during any assaults that may arise
To the people who did this study: You are academically worthless and deserve to live in a project or some other hell for the rest of your lilly-livered life!!! Now go get one...

JP of WA 2:51PM December 07, 2008

Once again, a study that claims one thing is the cause of another and ignores the fact that the opposite may be true. People who are happiest tend to gravitate toward other people who are happy and those people tend to have happy friends. There is no reason to think the happiness of friends' friends causes your own happiness. Didn't these people ever take a junior high school logic course?

Chad of IA 2:51PM December 07, 2008

I was going to comment on the frivolous,inconsequential and unscientific nature of this "study", but somebody already beat me to it. But that's fine. I'm glad I'm not the only one that recognizes this total waste of time and money. Highly educated people that engage in survey studies are dumbing down the whole concept of science.

debydeze of WV 2:13PM December 07, 2008

What an incredible waste of research assets. How about a study on whether most people prefer a cool breeze or a warm breeze? Mindless pop science.

deaner of 10:41AM December 06, 2008

When poeple need a study to tell them obvious truths like. People need sleep. Too much stress is not good for the body. Pollution kills. And know my personal favorite: Happiness is contagious. A person needs only to have lived 1 year to figure that out. Unless the researchers were surrounded by unhappy people and were curious if there was any benefit to having some happy people around!
-Just my thoughts

Ciceroji of CA 7:53PM December 05, 2008