Have you noticed that when you smile, the person you’re talking to makes you smile?Have you noticed what happens when a loved one is sad and tells you what’s going on?What happens to football fans when their team scores a goal?Answers to these questions are found in a phenomenon known as emotional contagion. Let’s see what it is.
Every time we interact with one or more people, the mechanisms of emotional contagion come into play, whether in our romantic relationship, in our group of friends or in our workplace, our relationships are affected by the way we approach.
- Thus.
- According to Daniel Goleman.
- Each of us is largely responsible for how the feelings of the people with whom we interact on a daily basis.
- Both positively and negatively.
- Affect us.
- But what are the mechanisms responsible for this situation?.
The way the bus driver greets us at the beginning of a new day can make us feel ignored, irritated or, on the contrary, appreciated. Emotions, though invisible, become infected as if they were a virus, and they do so through underground exchange in each of our relationships, perceived as negative or nutritious.
Emotional contagion is an imperceptible and subtle process that occurs constantly, in which emotional signals are emitted that affect the people around us.
The transmission of emotions is a primitive and unconscious process that acts as a synchrony and is born of our survival, through various mechanisms people develop an emotional dance to tune in imitating facial expression, everything begins with a smile, an expression of anger or tears. The simple fact of seeing someone express an emotion to evoke a similar state in us.
Although genetically we are all willing to participate in this contagion, there are people who are better able to transmit emotions or be infected by others, hypersensitive people are like emotional sponges capable of absorbing any emotional peak that occurs around them, such as PAS (very sensitive people). On the contrary, there is also the other side of the coin, those people unable to feel emotions, like psychopaths; However, who is responsible for this emotional contagion?
In the brain there is a group of neurons that daniel Goleman says function as “neurological wifi”. to connect with other brains and reflect in us what we observe from others. They’re mirror neurons. They are responsible, for example, for being emotional when we watch a movie or for the fear we feel when we see a person being beaten.
When mirror neurons activate, they start the same brain circuits that are active in the person we observe, so it is possible to feel an emotion like yours, even if we do not perform it, thanks to them and other areas. of our brain, such as the insula, it is possible to explain the phenomenon of emotional contagion.
But who is the person who sets the emotional tone of a group?, according to various surveys, the most emotionally expressive member if it is a group of equals; but when it comes to a context like work or class, in which there are differences in power, you will be the most powerful person to define the emotional state of the rest.
Emotional contagion occurs every time we interact and its common thread is empathy.
Many people, when they talk about the phenomenon of emotional contagion, equate it with empathy, but although they have some things in common and at some point one uses the other, they are not the same.
To feel empathy is to put yourself in the place of the other, to take into account the point of view of life and feelings, an art that not everyone is able to apply in their relationships with other people, but that would help a lot. However, putting yourself in each other’s place doesn’t mean letting one’s own feelings and emotions go, it’s simply considering that it exists and trying to understand it.
On the other hand, emotional contagion means feeling other people’s emotions as well as their own and not knowing how to release them, suffering their consequences.
To understand the difference, you might think that empathy is like diving into the water and that emotional contagion is like drinking a glass of water, the first experience leads us to know and understand the behavior of this fluid and the second is part of us.
This difference does not imply that at some point both are not necessary, and to be able to feel empathy it will take a small dose of emotional contagion, but without suffering an emotional abduction, this does not mean that the emotional contagion is bad; the truth is that it takes away our autonomy, but if the emotions are positive, wonderful!Who doesn’t like that silly laugh that we can’t stop and that others give us?