Emotions are Contagious ?

 "Research has found that emotions -- both upbeat ones like enthusiasm and joy, and negative ones like sadness, fear and anger -- are easily passed from person to person, often without either party's realizing it. Emotional contagion occurs in a matter of milliseconds, says Elaine Hatfield, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and co-author of "Emotional Contagion" (Cambridge University Press, 1994). If you're the receiver, you may not know what exactly happened, just that you feel differently after the encounter than you did before.



(...) During conversation, humans unconsciously tend to mimic and synchronize the other person's facial expressions, posture, body language and speech rhythms, explains John T. Cacioppo, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. (...) "The more expressive and sincere someone is, the more likely you are to see that expression and mimic it," (he) says.

In a study at Uppsala University in Sweden, researchers exposed people to pictures of happy or angry faces for 30 milliseconds, immediately followed by neutral faces. Even though the participants didn't realize they'd just looked at a happy or angry face, they responded with distinct facial muscle reactions of their own that corresponded to the emotion they'd just seen.

Those incremental muscle movements then trigger the actual feeling by causing the same neurons to fire in the brain as if you were experiencing the emotion naturally, according to Hatfield. In other words, the mood feedback loop can travel in both directions: Normally, when you feel happy, your brain might send a signal to your mouth to smile. With the mood-contagion effect, the facial muscles involved in smiling might begin to twitch when you're with a cheerful friend and those tiny muscle movements then send a signal to your brain, telling it to feel happy.

(...) This communicative dance is highly adaptive and functional, experts say, because it allows you to know what other people are feeling or thinking.

(...) The degree to which people become emotionally in sync with each other depends partly on the level of intimacy and emotional investment in their relationship. Not surprisingly, people living under the same roof are especially likely to catch each other's moods.

In a study at Northwestern University, researchers periodically induced and assessed emotional responses in both dating partners and college roommates: Over the course of a year, they found that people in both types of relationships became more similar in their emotional responses. Among those who were dating, the partners who experienced emotional convergence had relationships that "were more cohesive and less likely to dissolve," the authors concluded.

(...) 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." (...)