Moods and Emotions Are Contagious

Submitted by tonyplant on June 1, 2006 - 19:08.

Not many 12 year-olds are so desperate that they consider killing their own father. Several years ago I heard an author talking about his childhood. The memory that stays with me is when he described his father entering a room and acting as a black hole for all positive emotion or blitheness of spirit. The family responded by self-censoring their emotions even when the father wasn't present. The author recounted an incident when he was 12 years old when desperation made him offer a cup of tea to his father that he had laced with rat poison. He never made tea for his father. The boy's father took the tea, looked at it, looked at him and laughed. The father enjoyed a bleak victory in driving his family to such extremes.

I've always considered that childhood account to be a crushing and bleak example of emotional contagion. I think that many of us know people who are so sensitive to the moods of others that they sense anger, or can themselves become depressed. Fear and sadness can be transmitted from one person to another without the parties being aware of it.

Interviewed by Stacey Colino in a recent article for the Washington Post, Professor John Cacioppo attributes this transmission to the human instinct to mimic others during communication.

[T]he more expressive and sincere someone is, the more likely you are to see that expression and mimic it...The muscle fibers [in your face and body] can be activated unbeknownst to you, at much lower levels than if you were to express those movements yourself initially.

For those familiar with the ideomotor response it seems as if our muscles can react and respond without our conscious knowledge. Several theories of communication suggest that this process initiates a feedback loop where we see someone smile, our smiling muscles mimic the action, this behavioural action is linked to our state and raises our positive state which may make us smile. Unfortunately, there is a similar mimicry for negative emotions that may result in the transmission of fear, alarm, depression or sadness.

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