Emotional Contagion Contributes to Turmoil

Before we discuss how emotional contagion contributes to social and political turmoil, let’s talk about what emotional contagion is. Other people’s emotions can rub off on you; emotions may feel like they move about and can be caught by others nearby. For example, this could happen if a co-worker overheard a contentious conversation involving hurt feelings at a nearby cubicle. They could catch the emotions. It could change this co-worker’s mood, even if they didn’t know the people well or know about the subject matter. This phenomenon is emotional contagion. This happens more than we know: in groups, in families, and within and between organizations and political factions. This effect extends, in a similar way, to video, audio, and social media.

Bear with us while we discuss the physiology involved in emotional contagion. Scientifically, interest in emotional contagion was stimulated, according to Rempala (2013), in part by the discovery of mirror neurons. Neurons are the cells that conduct nerve impulses through our body, through the axons and dendrites that reach out from the body of the neuron, transmitting impulses to adjoining neurons. The body has many neurons. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in different areas of the brain. A mirror neuron system is a group of specialized neurons that “mirrors” the actions and behavior of others (Rajmohan and Mohandas, 2007). The physiology involved is important because it means it is an actual thing that happens to us in our bodies and our brains, and is not just in our imagination.

This means we easily pick up and absorb emotions portrayed by other people, and then feel them in ourselves, as if they were “natural,” when they are only “mirrored” from someone else. They don’t come directly from an interaction or an experience we all get in the natural environment, such as talking with someone we are with or watching a movie. Instead, they come absorbing from someone else’s emotions when that person is near us and interacts with the natural environment. If someone we are with is talking on their phone with their family member, we may pick up our friend’s feelings.

It is easy to feel like we have absorbed someone else’s strong feelings, so we use that language to make it easier, although we really haven’t absorbed the actual feelings. They are mirrored, just like our image of ourselves in a mirror is not really us, it is just an image of us. That experience can rattle us if we feel like we have been infected to the point that we have absorbed someone else’s feelings, which is where the phrase “contagion” comes from. It seems like it comes inside us, but it doesn’t; it is really the mirror neurons recreating it within ourselves. This is your inoculation: to realize that they really aren’t yours. However, you can allow them in, if you wish. We often absorb the feelings of others automatically as we may allow ourselves to do so subconsciously.

We can prevent ourselves from absorbing the emotions of others through contagion if we consciously identify that it is happening at the time it begins to happen. We can stop the absorption so we don’t feel it inside ourselves, by the things we tell ourselves about what is happening. For example, when the co-worker feels emotions coming from the nearby contentious conversation (that she is not involved in) are changing her mood, she could say to herself, at the time, “This feeling is not mine,” followed by a more assertive, “I don’t want it”, or similar words. She could also say, silently, “Get away” to the feeling, as if she is talking to an unwanted insect that has landed on her. It may feel strange or awkward talking silently to a feeling, but we all talk to ourselves silently, and doing so has some power over our feelings. You are not accepting the feeling. It is not yours, it is just a mirror of someone else’s, and you do not like it, and are not allowing it to be absorbed inside you.

Emotional contagion as a concept was developed from research by Elaine Hatfield, who defined the term as the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with another person’s, and to converge emotionally. (Hatfield et al, 1994). It can be triggered by facial expressions, indirect human interactions, and or by observing other people's behavior in direct and indirect interactions, according to Herrando and Constantindes (2021). These authors say that “emotional contagion can be triggered physiologically or neurologically by synchronizing with the emotional state of others during human interactions.” There is no reason to suspect it hasn’t been happening to many people and even groups of people during the past few years of increased stress and turmoil in many societies and countries around the world.

One way emotional contagion happens is through mimicry. To block the emotional contagion in these situations, make sure you don’t mimic the other person’s style, posture, movements, or phrasing. Without blocking emotional contagion, the emotions you absorb can have the effect of captivating you. The emotion brings a simple message with it, a message that could be moralistic, like if someone said in an emotional tone, “All Martians are bad”[1]. Or it could even be a message that accompanies an exciting song played by a band, a message that says, “Martian University is number one.”

If you absorb the emotion and the excitement from the band, you will be more easily persuaded by this person to agree with their ideas about Martians or their university because the message tags along with the emotion. If you start to feel the same emotion they do, then the emotional contagion has had an impact. If you realize that this is happening, and you disagree with their message, then you start to block the bulk of the emotion, and so you block the accompanying message.

But we often subconsciously absorb the emotions and the accompanying message. When we absorb emotions this way about a topic it can block our ability to think rationally about the topic. In the last few years, people’s emotions have ridden to new heights, often boiling over, especially when differences in social and political issues occur. In this post[2] I will talk about how to lower the emotional temperature to a manageable level. The focus of my blog is how to talk about political and social issues while staying neutral about the issues and keeping emotions and feelings manageable.

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In my book, Emotions Don't Think: Emotional Contagion in a Time of Turmoil, I discuss how emotional contagion contributes to social and political turmoil and how people can work at overcoming it to lower the turmoil. When others speak about controversial social-political issues they often do so with negative emotion, even if implicit. The impact of these emotions seems to be what produces divisiveness. Each one of us can do our part, by recognizing negative emotions when they come toward us from other people, and realize that they are intended to have an impact. We don’t have to let that happen.

Emotions can cause a lot of negative energy, through hate, panic, fear, anger, depression, suspicion, cynicism, and other infectious feelings. Emotions provide the energy for action. People living with depressed roommates may develop some depressed feelings. Being around someone who is suspicious may make you suspicious. Political leaders may be cynical, spreading and strengthening cynicism among others in the public who may also lean that way. Depressed, anxious, and suspicious moods produce similar actions, and so can affect our choices as well as our votes. We get divisive as emotional thinking pushes people to the extremes.

By managing and regulating our emotions while maintaining our positions on issues, we can prevent turmoil, chaos, and divisiveness in society.