Emotional contagion
The tendency to catch other people's emotions, often by automatically mimicking their faces, voices and postures.
What drives it
Keeps groups in sync and lets people read each other quickly; it explains why one person's mood can set the tone for a team or a household.
How it shows
Work
A leader's anxious tone in an all-hands spreads into hallway gossip within the hour; a single cynical team member drags down a meeting; a cheerful host lifts a dinner. Leaders' moods spread more strongly than juniors'.
Relationships
Partners whose moods converge across a day; a child who picks up a parent's tension without being told anything.
Self
Leaving a conversation in someone else's mood; noticing you are mirroring someone's posture and pace and feeling what they feel.
What tells it apart
Co-regulation: Contagion pulls toward the other's state, usually distress; co-regulation is one person staying steady so the other settles toward them.
Projective identification: Contagion is open mirroring of what the other is showing; projective identification makes you feel something the other is not showing and disowns, such as rage in the face of their calm.
Attunement: Attunement includes understanding what the other feels and responding to it; contagion is simply catching it, with no understanding needed.
A test
Notice whether your mood changed after spending time with someone, and whether your face and voice began to match theirs before you thought about their state.
Questions to carry
- After time with this person, whose mood are others carrying, and how fast did it spread?
- Whose mood do I catch before I notice it, and how does it show in my voice?
How strong the research is
moderate. Mimicry and mood transfer in groups are well documented; the strength of the effect and the mechanism (mimicry feeding back into feeling) are debated, and online effects are small.
Where it comes from
Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson, 1993 and 1994; Sigal Barsade, 2002