Do you have a colleague, confidant, coffee-bringer and shoulder to cry on when your boss is being a complete tool?

Well, a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science has found that moods of those closest to you are contagious.

So if your work wife is hating or loving life it’s likely you will too.

Researchers asked 2,194 high school students to answer questions about their besties while being screened for depression.

They found that kids whose friends suffered from bad moods were more likely to report bad moods themselves, and were less likely to see improvements in their feelings six months later.

On the other hand, participants who had more happy friends were likely to see their moods improve over time.

But lead author Robert Eyre says this nothing to worry about, instead just a, “Normal empathetic response that we’re all familiar with, and something we recognise by common sense.”

They also make clear that if your friend has depression, the effect is not strong enough to make you depressed. Their findings highlight the “importance of subthreshold levels of depressive symptoms” which could help earlier intervention against depression in high schools.

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