By Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College
Most psychologists believe that emotions are a product of the way our body reacts to an incident, how our brain perceives it, and eventually how we express ourselves. There are multiple factors that influence our experience of emotions. The impact of our social circle is one of these influential factors.
What Is Emotional Contagion?
For years, psychologists have focused on stimulus, arousal and even the environment we are in, to understand the experience of an emotion. However, further research studies have also brought an individual’s social circle under the consideration.
Emotional contagion is when you catch and reflect the emotions of people around you. Understanding someone else’s emotion can mean enacting that emotion, and this is why emotions, like the flu, can be contagious.
You may have certain friends or family members who are always in a good mood and spending time with these people lifts how we feel. That’s an example of what psychologists describe as emotional contagion. For example, when people are shown pictures of angry faces, their own eyebrow muscles involved in frowning are activated.
Clues from a Data Study
One of the clearest studies to demonstrate the power of emotional contagion on a wider scale examined data available from what had originally been a study of risk factors related to cardiovascular disease. Researchers gathered data from thousands of people living in Framingham, Massachusetts, over a 30-year period, from 1971 to 2003.
The study was initially designed specifically to measure risk factors related to heart disease—obesity, smoking, alcohol use—but the researchers had also asked participants about their social ties—family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.
People were asked to list the names of people they had regular contact with, and then also how much time they spent with the person on a daily basis.
Researchers then conducted a social network analysis with 5,000 people from the Framingham data over a 20-year period, from 1983 to 2003. And their findings clearly indicated that happiness is contagious.
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Contagious Happiness
People who were surrounded by many happy people showed increases in happiness over time. For example, having a happy friend living within a mile of a person’s home increased the probability that a person is happy by 25%. Having a happy spouse, next-door neighbor or sibling living in close proximity also led to increases in happiness.
What was particularly remarkable about their findings was that happiness can also be increased indirectly, meaning through broader connections within a social network.
For example, having a happy friend increases your own happiness probability by about 15%. But having a friend who has a happy friend, even if your actual friend isn’t happy, increases your own chance of happiness by nearly 10%.
And even more, distant connections tend to increase happiness: having a friend who has a friend with a happy friend still increases our own chance of happiness by about 5%.
Contagious Negativity
Although these findings point to the advantages of having happy people in our social networks, these relationships can of course also work in the opposite way. Being around people who are negative can make you feel worse.
In a creative test of the power of negative experiences to spread through social media, researchers in 2014 first evaluated the amount of both positive and negative emotions conveyed in people’s Facebook posts. Then they compared the frequency of these emotional expressions to the amount of rainfall in each poster’s city.
Social Media Can Be a Factor, Too
As one might expect, people tend to post more negative emotions, and fewer positive emotions, on rainy days. For a large city, such as New York City, the researchers estimated that a rainy day leads to an additional 1,500 negative posts by those living in that city compared to a non-rainy day.
But what is even more interesting about this study is that the researchers then examined how one person’s Facebook post could influence the emotions expressed in posts by their friends in other cities, where the weather could be different.
To return to the New York City example; a rainy day in New York City not only yields an estimated 1,500 negative posts by those living in the city (and experiencing the rain) but an estimated 700 additional negative posts by friends living elsewhere (and not necessarily experiencing rain).
On a practical level, all of these findings on emotional contagion point to the importance of trying to find happy friends.
So, our immediate social network, either in person or online, can influence our emotions, for better or for worse.
Common Questions about Emotional Contagion
Emotional contagion is when you catch and reflect the emotions of people around you. Understanding someone else’s emotion can mean enacting that emotion, and this is why emotions, like the flu, can be contagious. For example, when people are shown pictures of angry faces, their own eyebrow muscles involved in frowning are activated.
Findings from a research study clearly indicated that happiness is contagious. People who were surrounded by many happy people showed increases in happiness over time. Hence, having a happy friend living within a mile of a person’s home increases the probability that a person is happy by 25%.
Although the findings point to the advantages of having happy people in our social networks, these relationships can of course also work in the opposite way where being around people who are negative can make you feel worse. So, our immediate social network, either in person or online, can influence our emotions, for better or for worse.
