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It is a common experience for family members or groups of friends: the mood of one person can result in the energy of the whole group – or more. But why are we so easily influenced?
In 1962, the reality TV show Hidden camera offered a remarkable insight into a psychological phenomenon that helps explain how emotions are spreading. They did it through a now famous comedy stunt called "Face the Rear".
It looks like this: we see an unsuspecting man entering an elevator that has been secretly rigged with cameras. Two other people walk after him. But strangely, they are turning to the back wall of the elevator. The man looks confused, but continues to face the front despite the two crazies next to him. But when a third person arrives and faces the back wall, the poor guy can no longer stand it and also turns to the back wall.
Now the dance is launched. The three newcomers are turning now and the target of the joke is turning to join them. Hidden camera observe this phenomenon again and again. An unsuspecting victim would enter that elevator and end up imitating what the people around him were doing.
Now, the initial gradual shift of man to face the back wall with others is something that psychologists call compliance, when you slowly and consciously decide to follow the group.
But sometimes, the victim in the joke begins to follow what people do automatically, so that it is called otherwise: contagion. Finally, the man in the Hidden camera the video began to move in perfect sync with the people who surrounded it, so that she looked almost choreographed.
"When we look at other people, for whatever reason, we are able to synchronize with them on so many things that it amazes you in the mind … and they calculate that it's a good thing. is so fast that you could not do it consciously – it has to go through the brainstem, "says Elaine Hatfield, a psychology researcher at the University of Hawaii, and her husband, Dick Rapson, have spent a good part of their careers examining this phenomenon.
Some of the ways we synchronize with people around us are more obvious: imitating people's postures and speech patterns. But others are silent. For example, if you talk to a friend, you will end up starting to blink one at a time. Or if you look at someone stuttering, the tiny muscles in your mouth may begin to contract. And when are you sitting around a conference table at a meeting? People often also start to mimic their breathing habits, each breathing as one.
"It's so hip, and in the primitive parts of the brain, that animals do it. Even small birds imitate one another. It happens. It flows like a breath, "explains Hatfield.
But we imitate not only the physical movements of each other, but also the emotions. And that's the specialty of Rapson and Hatfield: emotional contagion.
They first became aware of the idea of emotional contagion while working as therapists. They had a client who came and was very busy, speaking very quickly and energetically. But they both started yawning, despite the fact that none of them felt tired. So why were they yawning?
"What we think is happening is that we were picking up the depression under its cascade of words," says Rapson. It was their idea – that depression was telegraphed to them non-verbally. They then looked at the issue and discovered that in reality, emotions are losing a person's face in very measurable and consistent ways, called micro-expressions.
Micro-expressions are ephemeral, involuntary expressions of feelings that last only a fraction of a second.
After years of research, Rapson and Hatfield then added to the equation that their automatic imitation of these micro-expressions can actually produce the corresponding emotion in us. Because, although the magnitude of the effect is debated, many studies have shown that one of the modes of production of emotions is from the outside.
"We have real little pale reflections of what others think and feel," says Hatfield, and these reflections can have real and tangible effects on our own thoughts and feelings.
So, even if we travel around the world thinking that we are individuals, Rapson and Hatfield think it's an illusion. "We will become like the society we keep," she says.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we are closely connected to each other and we contract the feelings and thoughts of people around us, almost like a virus.
So, the next time you are in a group and the bad vibrations of someone you are slaughtering? The best cure might be to go out and find someone who will contaminate you in a better mood.
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