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.

There is a long-standing controversy concerning the influence of our word-choices on our emotional state and what it reveals about our attitudes (e.g., the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). According to Frank Bernieri, author of a study cited in the Washington Post, we tend to match the emotional tone of our word choices (in particular, words with negative associations such as "hate," "worthless," "anger" and "sad") to the word tone of the other party in the conversation.

Communication requires the matching of specific words and contents so [people] can understand each other. So it's not hard to imagine the language driving some part of this contagion process.

Ironically, we rely so much on our unconscious ability to understand the mood of others that people without this ability may be diagnosed with a variety of disorders on the autistic spectrum, including autism, Asperger's Syndrome, ADD or ADHD. Mis-matching someone's tone or expression, and providing them with the wrong type of explanation can signal that we are emotionally disengaged from others.

Preliminary research among people in romantic relationships indicates that partners who exhibited emotional convergence had relationships that lasted over the year of the study: another study reported that if one spouse is depressed, the other spouse is likely to experience similar symptoms. Colino writes that:

While some people are more prone to infecting others with their moods, others are more likely to become engulfed by people's emotions. People who are more expressive -- meaning, they wear their hearts on their faces and their sleeves -- may be more likely to spread their emotions because they telegraph their feelings more powerfully. On the other hand, it appears that people with high autonomic reactivity -- they respond strongly internally to emotional events (their hearts may race when they're nervous though they seem calm on the outside) -- may be more susceptible to catching other people's moods, Cacioppo says. That Look--It's Catching!. Colino, Washington Post

There are advantages and disadvantages to the transmission of moods and emotions. We would lose our empathy and much of the richness of our communication if we were not receptive to the moods and emotions of others. But for our own resilience, we do need to be able to resist shifts in emotion and mood that might be harmful to us. It is a balancing act between being good communicators and listeners, while also retaining autonomy of our emotional state. We need to be aware of the impact of others on ourselves, and ourselves on others.

We can influence ourselves and others positively through our emotions and moods. Enthusiasm, motivation and happiness can be as contagious as more negative emotions. When appropriate, they are transmissions that may be beneficial to our health.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

resilience | positive psychology | happystance | happiness | emotion | depression