We must salute the bus drivers of Queanbeyan.
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I have missed my bus in the morning and the next one turns up. The heroic driver radios ahead to the driver of the bus I missed.
I then get ferried - chauffeured - to the right bus so I'm not late for work.
Queanbeyan bus drivers are generally good humoured. They wish you "good morning" when you ascend their rickety chariot. They wish you a nice day when you alight (transport term for "to get off").
I've had one come back for me when the driver realised that she had left me standing.
Their smiles don't feel forced. They are not the product of some charm school for drivers. A smile is hard to fake. Try it. The unsmiling eyes are the giveaway, whatever your lips do.
This matters. Niceness is infectious and if someone is pleasant to us at the beginning of the day, the feeling lasts. Conversely, work in an office full of moaners and we start to moan ourselves.
![Reporter Steve Evans, who is not a Queanbeyan bus driver, but did get to learn to drive a bus earlier this year. Picture: Karleen Minney Reporter Steve Evans, who is not a Queanbeyan bus driver, but did get to learn to drive a bus earlier this year. Picture: Karleen Minney](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc7411gvkd3p21m1fhwgzn.jpg/r0_492_3386_2828_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
There is a scientific basis for what we already half know.
Psychologists have concluded that we can catch bad or good moods from others. They call it "emotional contagion", a phrase coined by three researchers in 1993.
In cheap journalistic shorthand: grumpiness is contagious and so is cheerfulness. Goodwill radiates like sunshine and miserableness dampens like a fog.
It has three stages, according to an American psychologist writing in Scientific American: "The first stage involves non-conscious mimicry, during which individuals subtly copy one another's nonverbal cues, including posture, facial expressions and movements," wrote Gary W. Lewandowski.
"Seeing my frown makes you more likely to frown. People may then experience a feedback stage - because you frowned, you now feel sad.
"During the final contagion stage, individuals share their experiences until their emotions and behaviors become synchronised. Thus, when you encounter a co-worker on a bad day, you may unknowingly pick up your colleague's non-verbal behaviors and begin to morph into an unhappy state.
"Mimicry is not all bad, however; a person can also adopt a friend or colleague's good mood, which can help enhance their bond."
![Queanbeyan bus driver, Greg Bateman. Picture: Steve Evans Queanbeyan bus driver, Greg Bateman. Picture: Steve Evans](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc78dozkytxlfgyhogbkt.jpg/r0_0_4150_3016_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
This is important for all of us. Without wishing to appear folksy, it means that cheerful people make those around them feel better.
So seek them out, say I - and shun the world's moaners who make you feel that their rather nice place of work is actually worse than sweating away down a coal mine.
Infectious grumpiness may be why some people - me included - feel less happy in cities where people seem to wear their defensive grumpy masks and depress the mood of the rest of us. Friendliness can be catching. So can what seems like hostility.
Sydney and London have huge upsides - vast numbers of interesting things and people - but they can make you feel terribly gloomy. The psychologists have a useful phrase - "negative politeness culture" - where people think it's rude to intrude on the lives of strangers with chat. The Japanese have it in spades. So do Londoners - but not many Queanbeyan bus drivers.
The idea of "emotional contagion" has a bearing on the way we use social media. Sometimes, reading Twitter or Facebook makes you feel you need a shower - can people really be that cynical. Are humans really capable of such foulness to strangers?
And sure enough, scientists have confirmed what we suspected.
It's true the experiment was controversial, with all kinds of issues about privacy, but the conclusion was that looking at endless negative Facebook postings makes us more likely to post negative stuff ourselves.
Grumpiness and good humour are contagious, and not just on the Queanbeyan bus.
The researchers worked with Facebook and looked at the output of 689,000 anonymous users.
On Facebook, you get a "news feed" of what friends are up to. The researchers found a way of filtering these feeds to make them more or less negative, filtering out good or bad feelings by filtering out negative words.
They found that when fewer negative words were in the news feed, the reader was more likely to be positive in his or her own postings.
As the researchers put it, "When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.
"These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks."
It's not just bad or good temper that we transmit. Within marriage, for example, robust research indicates that couples can make each other feel better about their marriage by the way they greet each other.
Here's how the Institute for Family Studies puts it: "It's 5.30pm when your spouse walks in the front door," the author, Anna Sutherland, writes.
"What's the first thing you do? a) Ask him/her to do something, b) Complain about how cranky the kids have been or about your tough workday, or c) Smile and say 'hi'.
"Option C might not come naturally at the end of a long, stressful day, but an increasing amount of research implies that mundane positive interactions lay the foundation for strong, lasting marriages."
In other words, grumpiness and good humour are contagious, and not just on the Queanbeyan bus, but in the home and for multitudes of people on social media.
The non-scientific conclusion: shun the grumpy; befriend the nice.
But you knew that just by taking the bus.