A shared universe › Blog › Joy is catching · Español
Emotions are catching: without noticing, we imitate the expression, voice and posture of whoever is in front of us, and that stirs in us something like what they feel. A large study also found that happiness clusters among friends, relatives and neighbours, although how much of it is contagion is still debated. You walk into a room where someone is in a bad mood and you notice it before they say anything. The same happens with joy.
The researcher Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson gave this phenomenon a name in a 1993 paper titled “Emotional Contagion”. The idea is simple: one person’s emotions tend to pass to the people who are with them.
As for how it happens, a 2017 review by Prochazkova and Kret brings together evidence that we automatically imitate other people’s facial expressions, voice, posture and even bodily state, and that this imitation ends up stirring a similar emotion in us. Its authors acknowledge that why and how it fully works is still poorly understood.
The researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler analysed data from a large health study, the one in the town of Framingham, in the United States, which between 1983 and 2003 had followed 4,739 people and had recorded who was a friend, relative or neighbour of whom. According to their paper, published in 2008 in the medical journal BMJ, happy people tended to be surrounded by happy people, and those with happy people around them were more likely to become happy later on.
The effect depended a great deal on closeness. A friend living within a mile becoming happy raised the probability of being happy yourself by 25%; for a next-door neighbour, by 34%. Among co-workers no effect was seen, and with distance and time the effect faded.
According to their analysis, the link could be seen up to three steps away: the friend of a friend of a friend. In other words, it reached people who did not know one another.
Other researchers have debated how much of that is contagion and how much is that we gather with people like us or share the same surroundings. In the same issue of the journal, Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher applied similar methods to things that are not catching, such as acne, headaches or height, and also found apparent effects between friends that disappeared once shared surroundings were taken into account. That is why they urge caution before talking about contagion. The underlying idea, that emotions do not stay only with the person who feels them, rests above all on the studies of imitation and emotional contagion.
Without overstating what the numbers say, there are some ideas worth taking away:
Telling the good things that happen to you is one of the simplest ways of sharing them, as we explain in sharing good news. And if you are interested in why helping others also does the helper good, we cover it in acts of kindness.
Contagion works in both directions. Being close to someone who is having a hard time can leave you sad or tired too. That does not mean you have to keep away, but that it is worth looking after yourself: resting, finding moments that lift your spirits and having someone to talk to yourself.
And if you are the one who is sad, there is no need to hide it so as not to “spread” it. Sharing what you feel with people who love you usually brings you closer rather than pushing them away.
In A shared universe, every phrase you leave reaches someone you don’t know. The person who lit the star sees how many times it has been kept company and what has been said, though never by whom. And when that person feels they have company, it is easier for them to keep someone else company. If you feel like starting, the “Keep someone company” button takes you to the stars that have had least company.