Researchers have been publishing studies about social networks and their effect on happiness.

At first, it did not quite make sense. Why would a cheerful dry cleaner add to happiness?

But it turns out that happiness is catching and the more happy people you know, the more happiness you may catch.

This is a fascinating article, one which reminds us of how much effect we have on others as well as the effect they may have on us.

Social networks play an important role in health, as this article shows.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine

…”FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior….”

Source: New York Times Magazine, September 13, 2o09