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.

Happy people cluster together, the research suggests. And the opposite also seems to be true — so if you are miserable, you are more likely to have miserable friends.

The effect holds in both the real and virtual worlds. People who put smiling photos on their profiles for social networking sites such as Facebook tend to link to one another. Frowners do likewise.

But it’s not just direct contact that counts. The link is significant to three degrees of separation — that is, your own emotional state is connected to that of your friends’ friends’ friends. (Source)

Well, “clusters of happiness” seem too cheerful for me.

I’ll be honest with you, I rarely if ever accept “funny stickers”, “fun wall” posts or other supposedly funny applications for so you can say that I do have happy friends if the definition of that is now measured by the number of funny posts and videos one sends or receives but also based on the same measure, it looks like I’m immune to it.

I also never download any of the funny videos or power point files my friends send to me through Email. I just can’t be bothered by electronic funny stuff. Don’t know why. I probably smile and giggle more than your average Arab friend but online humor in the form of facebooking or Email attachments annoy me. They’re distractions and time wasters to me more than anything else.

Would be interesting though to know if my facebook friends think I’m a happy person !