We’ve been hearing a lot lately about how interconnected Wall Street and Main Street are. Well, it turns out that connection may be even stronger than we think; it may go deep down into the subconscious.

That’s what experts say about a conclusion in a series of surveys of small-business owners by the City Business Journals Network, an advertising affiliate of Portfolio.com’s parent company, American City Business Journals, that the optimism or pessimism felt by small-business owners about their own businesses tracks the fluctuations of the Dow Jones industrial average.

So, with the Dow clawing its way back up toward 10,000, the latest survey of business owners for Portfolio.com shows optimism is also climbing.

Fifty-two percent of business owners with 5 to 499 employees surveyed felt optimistic about their business’ prospects in the next 12 months when the survey was taken in August and September, as the latest Dow rally was well under way. That optimism number was up 22 percent from March, when optimism hit its low of 35 percent as the market wallowed. An even bigger number, 71 percent, of executives of companies with more than 500 employees surveyed in September were optimistic.

The number of small-business people very concerned about the U.S. economy dropped to 59 percent in September from 69 percent in August and 77 percent in March, again when the market was down. For the first time in at least six months, the economy wasn’t the top concern of business owners. They were more worried about the rising cost of benefits including health insurance in September than they were about the economy. And more business leaders, 38 percent, thought the economy was finally starting to turn around than felt it wasn’t, 33 percent.

“I always say the Dow Jones is up, optimism is up,” says Godfrey Phillips, the City Business Journals Network vice president who oversaw the research. “People really want to be optimistic.”

For Howard Learner of Kaldi’s Coffee in St. Louis, the connection between the market and how he feels about business, or just about anything, certainly rings true.

“The Dow Jones is basically my mood ring,” Learner said. “It’s sort of like a security thing. What it’s come to mean is how is the economy doing? It’s funny because it really is stupid. Thirty stocks are irrelevant to most people’s lives. It’s very unsophisticated, but in a sense it can become a very self-fulfilling prophecy. Kooky, but it’s amazing when you think about it.”

Well, maybe not so kooky, says Jason Pride, vice president and director of research at Haverford Investments, who is also a student of behavioral finance.

He says it’s difficult to tell which comes first, the business optimism or the rise in the Dow. “I would lay out a question as to which one leads to the other,” he said.

For example, start your clock in March, when everything looks truly grim. But someone—an investor, a consumer, a businessperson—decides that it’s gone far enough, hit bottom, and maybe it’s time to start doing some buying.

That decision they make can give someone else confidence to do something similar, maybe invest in a stock or buy something for their business. Maybe some economists and Wall Street analysts start picking up on the trend, and things start to snowball.