Good or bad moods can be ‘picked up’ from friends: Study

London: Good and bad moods can be “picked up” from friends and spread through social networks, but the effect is not strong enough to push people into depression, a study has found. Using mathematical modelling researchers found that having more friends who suffer worse moods is associated with a higher probability of an individual experiencing low moods and a decreased probability of improving. They found the opposite applied to adolescents who had a more positive social circle. The findings imply that mood does spread over friendship networks, as do various different symptoms of depression such as helplessness and loss of interest. However they also found that they also found that the effect from lower or worse mood friends was not strong enough to push the other friends into depression. “We investigated whether there is evidence for the individual components of mood — such as appetite, tiredness and sleep — spreading through US adolescent friendship networks while adjusting for confounding by modelling the transition probabilities of changing mood state over time,” said Rob Eyre, from the University of Warwick in the UK. “Evidence suggests mood may spread from person to person via a process known as social contagion,” said Eyre. “Previous studies have found social support and befriending to be beneficial to mood disorders in adolescents while recent experiments suggest that an individual’s emotional state can be affected by exposure to the emotional expressions of social contacts,” he said.