The Collective Existence of Emotion

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you. 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.”

~ Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, speaking with the New York Times about his article, “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study,” which was published Thursday (12/04/08) in the British Medical Journal.

[Thanks LInda!]