In the latest and by far the biggest buzz-producer on the subject, Christakis and Fowler concluded that happiness is contagious.  If your friends become happy, sooner or later you will too. 

Yea right.

Tell that to the 6 Yankee fans living in Boston in October, 2004 when their team experienced the greatest collapse in American sports history, at the hands of the dreaded Sawx no less.

Those few-and-far-between Yankee fans were immersed by a wave of collective happiness involving essentially everybody within a 200 mile radius. The celebration continued well after the Townies rolled to their first World Series victory in 86 years.

How happy were people in Boston? 60 year-old men wept openly and wished only that their fathers were still alive to share the joy. 40 year-olds wept too. They hoped their little ones would remember where they were when it happened.

Friends, family members, work associates, even the baristas and gas pumpers of those 6 Yankee fans got happy, but the emotion sure didn’t spread to those poor Yankee fans.

The Red Sox triumph was an epiphenomenon, a big, contextual event that out-explains the explanation given by Christakis and Fowler.

Subtle epiphenomena from upticks in the economy to a cool new teacher at middle school, to the release of a Harry Potter movie provide a more plausible explanation for Christakis and Fowler’s observations, even though the particular epiphenomena at work are unknown and unknowable.

Look, when the Sox won game 4 to cut the series deficit to 1-3, a handful of Sox fans became happy. At least we weren’t swept, those few fans reasoned.

A day later the Sox won game 5 and more people became happy.

When the Sox won their third in a row to tie the series, pandemonium reigned and that was dwarfed by the transcendent moment at the end of game 7.

The epiphenomenon of the Sox’ comeback explains how, over time more Bostonians got happy. Christakis and Fowler want you to believe instead that happiness is contagious. That’s buzz-worthy and actually plausible at first blush, but it is simply wrong and 6 Yankee fans living in Beantown will attest to that.

Medical and surgical residents aren’t stocking up on flannel pajamas just yet, but if an expert panel commissioned by the Institute of Medicine has its way, they will be working no more than 16 consecutive hours before qualifying for 5 hours of rack time.

In commenting on the shift-length reductions for the Washington Post, panel chief Michael M. E. Johns said “our overarching conclusion is that the science clearly shows that fatigue increases the chances of (medical) errors.”

Excessive fatigue has direct negative effects on residents as well, increasing the risk of depression and auto accidents for example.

In 2003 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education announced it would allow shifts of up to 30 consecutive hours while setting at 80 hours an upper limit on the work week.

The IOM panel did not suggest reducing the 80 hour work week because the replacement manpower simply isn’t there and if it were, putting all those new people to work would cost billions.

Meanwhile, flaunting ACGME rules has become an art form. That first year after the rules went into effect for example, 43% of interns claimed they worked more than 80 hours per week on a regular basis.

A more recent study from Vanderbilt found that 85% of residents had violated the 30-hour shift maximum during in the last year.

The expert panel acknowledged that shift limit manipulations have complex effects on the quality of care. In particular, reductions in errors caused by fatigue might be offset by increases in errors that transpire during patient “handoffs” at the change of shift.

And the news wasn’t all good for residents. The panel also wants to reduce allowable moonlighting hours meaning some won’t pay off their school loans until they’re old enough to qualify for social security.

Happiness is contagious, or at least that’s how 2 scientists explain what they observed when they analyzed self-reported data on emotional well-being from the Framingham Heart Study.

In addition to their emotions, study participants had also identified family members, friends and employers participating the Study. The resulting 50,000 social ties enabled the scientists to map out a happiness grid.

They used it to track happiness as it ebbed and flowed among residents of the Massachusetts city.

They concluded in the British Medical Journal that happy people caused family members and friends but not coworkers to become happy and the impact extended out, albeit with decaying strength, to 3 degrees of separation (the friends of one’s friends’ friends). 

Surprisingly, happy people were 3 times more likely to cause close friends to become happy than their spouses.

“You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience,” Nicholas Christakis told the Washington Post.

But the study’s co-author claims his findings show that “it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected.”

“It’s a pathfinding article,” decorated psychologist Martin Seligman gushed to the Post.  The professor at the University of Pennsylvania added, “It’s totally original, and the findings are striking.”

“This now makes me feel so much more responsible that I know that when I come home in a bad mood I’m not only affecting my wife and son but my son’s best friend or my wife’s brother,” study co-author James Fowler told the New York Times.

Maybe, maybe not. A post appearing later today offers another way to interpret the data.