Catching feelings

WE MAY THINK THERE’S A REASON FOR EVERY FEELING BUT, AS IT TURNS OUT, NOT ALL our emotions ARE OUR OWN

- ALEXANDRA ENGLISH

You know that nagging sense of anxiety you can’t quite put a finger on, or that bad mood that keeps getting worse because you can’t identify the cause (you’ve even checked the calendar: it’s not PMS and none of the planets are in retrograde)? It might not have been yours to begin with.

Just as we pass on germs to the people closest (in proximity and otherwise) to us, we also share and contract one another’s feelings in a phenomenon known as emotional contagion. Instagram’s favourite illustrator Julie Houts (@jooleeloren) recently posted a visual representation of this: a hand waving (labelled “Me”) from underneath a pile of dirt (labelled “Your bullshit”) and a smiley-face balloon floating away (labelled “My good day”). Psychologist, researcher and author Dr Lea Waters explains emotional contagion this way: “It’s basically the catching of someone else’s mood. You absorb another person’s emotion, and it causes you to lose your own mood and your own sense of perspective. Emotional contagion happens at a very subconscious level, and it’s a deeply primal, evolutionary process that’s been programmed into us.”

Human beings are really good at subconsciously scanning their conversational partner’s face for clues as to whether they’re enjoying the chat, how they’re feeling in general and whether they’re telling the truth. In the past, being able to read the emotions of our tribe members was crucial for survival, and while that’s obviously less relevant today, we still need some level of emotional synchrony to understand the people around us. Emotional contagion occurs when we add to these mind-reading skills by mimicking the person we’re talking to.