As I walked from my car to the shopping mall entrance, I encountered him — a gentleman who demonstrated a random act of pure joy. He leaped off the curb, clicked his heels in the air in a truly carefree manner with a huge grin on his face.

The sight made me smile and pushed my already good mood further into a happier place. And when I am happy I feel so much better. That's got to be good for my health, right?

Not so fast, according to a recent study published in Lancet. Reseachers sought to determine whether happiness or a related subjective feeling of well-being was directly related to reduced mortality. Once they controlled for the unhappiness that is associated with poor health, the researchers concluded happiness did not have any direct effect on mortality among the 719,671 women studied, with an average age of 59 years.

I vehemently disagree. Here's why.

The research was part of a prospective study in the United Kingdom between 1996 and 2001 called the Million Woman Study. They used a baseline questionnaire asking the women to self-rate their health, happiness, stress, feelings of control, and whether they felt relaxed.

Of the women in the study, 39 percent reported being happy most of the time, 44 percent were usually happy, and 17 percent were considered unhappy. At the 10-year follow-up, 4 percent had died. After adjusting for some health and lifestyle factors — such as smoking, deprivation and body-mass index — the researchers found unhappiness was not associated with mortality in general.

Let's consider that for a moment. Depression can be considered "an absence of happiness" and lack of well-being. Merriam-Webster defines depression as a state of feeling sad or a serious medical condition in which a person feels sad, hopeless and unimportant and often is unable to live in a normal way.

And depression is considered to be a factor in increased mortality for many diseases.

In a study investigating mortality from all causes among those with coronary artery disease that included 2,390 participants, depression (but not anxiety) was associated with increased morbidity. Another 14-year prospective cohort study of 882 patients using self-reported depression in a questionnaire found that a co-morbid depression was associated with decreased mortality.

An 11-item questionnaire was used to determine that depression was associated with renal failure in a study involving 3,361 participants. This same study found a difference in the association of morbidity between white participants and black participants with a greater association among white participants. The conclusion is that there are additional variables to consider when evaluating health and depression.

In their discussion of the Lancet study in the Los Angeles Times, Ed Diener, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia; Sarah Pressman, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of California Irvine; and Sonja Lyumbormirsky, Ph.D., a professor at the University of California Riverside, commented that the study was weak.

"In well-crafted research, social scientists think carefully about question-and-answer design, the ordering of items and how many questions are too many before the participant gives up and stops answering or stops answering honestly," they said.

The study reported in Lancet was based on a single question, and it was number 306 in the 316-question survey.

"After answering so many questions about medications, diet and health history, a respondent might be a lot less happy than when she started, and a lot less cooperative," Lyumbormirsky and her colleagues went on to comment. "In fact, about 400,000 women in the Million Women Study apparently quit before reaching this question."

The group went on to remind their readers about the famous Nun Study. While smaller, this study clearly demonstrated that after following a group of women from age 22 to death that positive emotional well-being early in life and throughout life was associated with increased mortality.

Seeing some random person jump for joy may be enough to jolt most from a state of sadness to happiness. And certainly we all can appreciate that it may take much more than that to alleviate a clinical depression.

I still think the absence of depression and the presence of happiness is better for one's health. Just like random acts of kindness, random expressions of joy are good for the soul — and probably good for the heart, kidneys and bones as well.