Positive moods appear to spread through social networks -- up to three links away from the person you interact with -- according to a new study published in the Journal of Computational Science by Christopher Danforth and Peter Dodds, professors in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and their research team.

The finding that happiness might be contagious has a caveat, however: the phenomenon is not about simply following someone on Twitter, but two people connecting by directly replying to one another.

Researchers used a "hedomenter" for scoring the happiness level of words used in a tweet, measured on a scale of one to nine, with "love" rating 8.42 and "die" coming in at 1.74. "The study," according to the UK Huffington Post, "computed the happiness of each user by applying this 'hedometer' to all tweets authored by the user." Using this measure, contentment levels are higher the closer a user is to those who are very happy and declines with the degree of separation.

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