Emotional Contagion Or How We Convey Our Emotions To Others

Have you ever considered that when you smile at someone you are talking to, that person is also smiling at you? Have you ever noticed what happens when a loved one feels sad and tells you what’s going on? What happens to sports fans when their team scores? You can find the answer to these questions in a phenomenon we call emotional contagion. Let’s see what that means.

Whenever there is an interaction between us and someone else, the mechanisms of emotional contagion begin to spin. It doesn’t matter if it’s the important person in your life, a group of friends or your colleagues. Your relationships are affected by the way you interact with each other.

This is exactly what Daniel Goleman said. It is why each of us has a huge influence on the feelings of the people we interact with every day. This influence can be positive or negative. But… what are those mechanisms that make all this happen?

Feelings are contagious

The way the bus driver or your spouse greets you at the start of a new day has the power to make you feel ignored, bitter — or on the other hand — appreciated. Even though emotions are invisible, they are as contagious as a virus.  There is a lot going on under the surface of a relationship.

Emotional transference is a primitive, unconscious process that has a lot to do with our survival as a species. The mechanisms of this process are part of an emotional dance that people use to align themselves by copying facial expressions. Everything starts with a smile, an angry look or shed tears. All it takes is to see someone express an emotion. You will then start to show signs of exactly the same emotion.

We are all genetically programmed for emotional contagion. But some people are better at communicating their emotions or absorbing other people’s emotions. They are hypersensitive. Because like emotional sponges, they soak up every trace of an emotion around us. Perhaps they are HSPs (highly sensitive people).

But there is also another side of this coin. Because there are also people who are not able to feel emotions, such as psychopaths.  What, then, are the mechanisms underlying emotional contagion?

The role of mirror neurons

These are neurons in our brains that, according to Goleman, work as a kind of “neuron wifi”. Because they connect our brains to the brains of others. They take in what they see in other people, and reflect it within ourselves. Hence the name mirror neurons. For example, these neurons are responsible for your emotional response while watching a movie. They also give you a shock feeling when someone gets hurt.

When the mirror neurons start moving, they activate the same brain circuitry that is active in the people you are looking at. That’s how you end up experiencing that emotion as if it were your own, even though you haven’t actually experienced it naturally. So we find in the mirror neurons and in other parts of the brain, such as in the insular cortex, an explanation for the phenomenon that we call emotional contagion.

But who will ultimately set the emotional tone in a group? Several studies show that no one is more emotionally expressive than in a peer group. In a work situation or a school environment, however, there are different positions of power. The most powerful person in the room is the one who sets the tone for everyone else’s emotional state.

Empathy vs Emotional Contagion

When people hear about emotional contagion, they sometimes automatically associate it with empathy. They do have some things in common and are sometimes interchangeable. Yet they are not exactly the same.

Showing empathy is putting yourself in the other person’s place. You then think about their vision of the world and their feelings. It is a real art and not everyone knows how to use it. But it would be very useful if everyone could do this.

But putting yourself in the place of another person doesn’t mean detaching yourself from your own feelings. All it means is that you remember that the other person is there and that you are trying to understand them.

On the other hand, emotional contagion means internalizing other people’s emotions. So you are essentially incapable of not experiencing their emotions  as if they were your own.

Imagine empathy as stepping into water and emotional contagion as drinking a glass of water. In the first case, you do it to experience and understand how the liquid feels. But in the second case, you do it and it becomes part of you.

However, that doesn’t mean you don’t need both every now and then. If you want to be empathetic, sometimes you need a small dose of emotional contagion. But you must avoid emotional hijacking.

Emotional contagion isn’t bad. Yet it takes away some of your freedom. If the contagious feelings are positive, that’s even better! Who doesn’t love a burst of infectious laughter?

To conclude, we show you an interesting video on the subject. We also have another question for you. What emotions do you convey to other people?