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Published online 26 June 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.918
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The secret of happiness: grinning on the Internet
People who post smiley photos on social networking sites attract happy friends.
How happy you are is influenced by your social links to people you've never heard of and never met.
That's the conclusion of a US study looking at the spread of happiness and depression across social networks.
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I don't know if you have seen the movie called "What the bleep do we know", but that shows an interesting experiment on how we influence the things/people around us. Long story short, I cannot agree more that our attitude dictates who we attract in our circles. Even our physical appearance. Even a smile. Also, because we are social animals, we like to gather in groups. And when we do so, we tend to chose the groups who seems to have the characteristics we aspire to. Almost nobody likes unhappy people, but almost everybody likes happy people. So, without having done a research on this, I'm also inclined to believe that the happy faces (generally speaking) do attract more people than the unhappy faces. This does not necessarily translate into More True Friends, but only Larger Networks.
I found the part about facebook and smiley faces particularly interesting. I had heard of Christakis and his social networks experiment but wasn't aware of the online version. I think it's a fascinating phenomenon and once you start to look for it you really begin to become aware of its effect. In retrospect I can see where major shifts in my social network has had a significant impact on my life.