Emotional Contagion

Welcome back, and this training is all about emotional contagion. And really, if we think about it, it's about how we inoculate ourselves against the anger of other people. So the question that we always ask is, why do I become defensive in the presence of angry people? Or why do I become anxious in the presence of angry people, or fearful, or angry myself, or even emotional. Maybe you feel completely clenched up and the only thing you can do is run somewhere else and cry a little bit to release all of the brain toxins that have built up because you're in the presence of angry people. And the reason is because of a phenomenon known as emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is the transfer of emotions between people. It occurs automatically and it's also unconscious. Most of the time we're not even aware that it's activated and working on this. It is key to communication in groups because it facilitates rapid transfer of information without the need for speaking or communicating verbally. And most importantly, the communication of negative threat-related emotions is, was, is so critical and really was so critical to our predecessors 250 years— thousand years ago, that anger and fear contagion are an especially automatic process. What this means is that over the millions of years of evolution, our predecessors developed an innate ability to spread fear and anxiety amongst a group quickly and efficiently, so that if one person spotted a a predator, quickly everybody else was able to key in on that person's fear and anxiety, and everybody became alert. And obviously that facilitated survival in a very hostile and dangerous environment. So one way to think about this is that people are walking mood inductors. I love that phrase— walking mood inductors. So basically what this means is we are constantly influencing the moods and emotions and judgments, behaviors of every group that we're in. So when you're at the office or you're working your organization, not only is your mood and emotional state affecting everybody else, but everybody else's mood and emotion is affecting you. And so there becomes this group dynamic thing occurs where there's constant exchange of emotional information back and forth between you. And one of the reasons that you become defensive and angry when somebody starts yelling at you is because there is this emotional contagion that's going on. That— all of that is being propagated into the group, and you're picking up on not only the emotions of the angry person but all of the emotions of everybody around you who might be witnessing that angry outburst at the same time. And it's— until you become aware of it, it operates so powerfully outside of consciousness that all you know is that you're feeling really distressed and you really can't articulate why that is except maybe that you're being yelled at or you're dealing with somebody who's super angry. So just to give you an example of what contagion looks like, watch this short clip of these horses. This is, this is really interesting, and just see if you can see the emotional contagion going on because it's in all mammals. So you can see from that example of those horses, if you watch that first horse, she just barely lifted her head up because something caught her attention and all three horses just started running instantly. There was no communication between them other than the trans— middle of emotional energy. Anxiety, perhaps fear or arousal that got them all going. And human beings are exactly the same way. And when you start watching out for this in groups around you, you'll see it in play all over the place. So there's some interesting science that's behind this. We're just gonna go through this quickly. I don't wanna bury you in all of the technical stuff, but basically one idea is that there's automatic mimicry. And so what happens is the sender sends out facial and body language messages that are received by the listener, for example, and through our mirror neurons there's a shared neural activation. In other words, what we see the other person doing or experiencing, we simulate in our brain with these mirror neurons. That creates an automatic mimicry, and as you can see, it— as we begin to mimic, then we begin to infer unconsciously what's going on with the other person. And that— then we get into the autonomic mimicry there on the right, where we have hormonal synchronization, heart rate synchronization, pupil mimicry, and blushing. We actually begin to mimic physically inside ourselves exactly what's going on with the person who is having that strong emotion. And that then then creates emotional contagion. And as we'll see in a little bit, that leads us to, one, the ability to be empathic, but more importantly, the idea of what we have to do to inoculate ourselves against this kind of contagion when we don't want to especially be affected by negative emotions such as anger. So here's a little bit more detailed diagram. It's I'm gonna leave this up for a second and we'll just kinda walk through it so you can understand how it is. I'm gonna use the cursor as a pointer so you can see what we're talking about here. So here we have Individual A who is having an emotional experience. So we see these emotions, we know what emotions are, we've talked about that. And there's going to be, in strong emotions, there's going to be some, there's going to be arousal. So when arousal occurs, there's a physiological reaction such as blushing or sweat, or where the eyes are paying attention to. Maybe there's crying, so we have tears, pupils enlarge. And basically, this arousal is implicit, automatic, and it's dynamic, and its intensity will vary with the strength of the arousal. And then what will happen is we'll see, uh, expressions, facial expressions, body posture, and again, these expressions provide context, dynamics, and intensity depending upon what the emotional experience is. Then what we have over here is the contagion occurs in the way that we saw before because we begin as the listener or the person in the presence of this emotional purpose. We get exactly the same result. We will start blushing or sweating, our eyes will have the same kind of gaze, maybe we'll have tears or pupils. And down here in our expressions, we will actually begin to mimic exactly what's going on with the Lister. This is what we call emotional contagion. And if we are aware of it, then we can have cognition, which means we can appraise what's going on, and we can appraise what's going on within ourselves. Unfortunately, most people do not appraise what's going on. All they know is that they are feeling weird for some reason, different, and they don't understand what's understand what's going on. Our job is going to be able to pull this cognition into consciousness so that we can inoculate ourselves against this. And you can see then what happens to social perception. And again, if it's unconscious, we're going to tend to make negative inferences and negative judgments about what's going on because that's the safe way to do it. Most of the time though, those negative perceptions tend to be wrong. So here's what's going on with the idea of neural resonance. So, as you can see here, when we observe another person's emotional state, it activates in our brain the same neural representation that the other person is having in our own brain. And, and, and at the same time, we get autonomic and somatic responses related to them. That's what the last diagram shown— that we call this neural resonance. And it happens so quickly that we can be in the presence of somebody who gets emotional and all of a sudden we're going to start feeling the same kinds of emotions ourselves. So when somebody's really angry at you and you start feeling defensive or anxious or angry yourself, that's exactly what's going on. You're having a neural resonance going on with this person at an unconscious level and your body and mind are just simply— brain are reacting to synchronize with what this angry person is doing, saying, acting, and displaying. So here's a little bit of the neuroscience behind it. This is— I know for a lot of times neuroscience kind of gets people crazy and physiology gets people crazy. I'm just gonna go through this quickly. You don't have to really know this. I just want you to know that there's hard science behind this, just like everything else that I teach, I want to make sure that people know that what is being taught here is based on science, not on myth. So we've got the sender and the brains— the parts of the brain that are activated are in the limbic system, primarily the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the pituitary, and that activates certain hormones that gets the adrenal gland going, and then a hormone called CRH gets pumped out into the bloodstream, which causes the heart, heart to start racing. It may create muscle tension, the freezing reaction that people experience, for example. We'll also see pupil change and blushing. And all this stuff is happening. Well, the receiver is receiving this information, and in the beginning, it is picking up information through the ACC, which is the anterior cingulate cortex, the orbital frontal cortex, the amygdala, the pula, and these other systems again in the limbic system over here. And they activate the same basic chemicals, the ACTH, which is an adrenal chemical which gets the adrenal system firing up, and CRH is then pumped into the blood system. And now all of a sudden the receiver is having the same basic experience as the sender, and it's through this very complex system in both brains the way— is the way that this transmission works. Very interesting, very fascinating. Remember that it is completely unconscious and outside of our control unless we start paying really close attention to what's going on around us. So the point here is that there's a lot going on because our lives depended on it. You can just imagine 250,000 years ago that if one person in a clan spotted a predator of some kind, a saber-toothed tiger or a lion or some other predator, the ability to communicate that danger to the rest of the group rapidly, and especially when language had not been created yet and hominids did not have the ability to speak to each other, the ability to transfer threat information via emotional contagion was highly adaptive. And people who had good emotional contagion—they were able to sense other people's negative emotions, threat emotions—tended to survive, and those that didn't were cleaned out of the gene pool. So again, we have inherited the paranoid genes of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution. Here's another really interesting counterintuitive fact that is really useful, especially if you are in a leadership position, which you probably are if you're enrolled here. People with power, people who are leaders, are more likely to be susceptible to emotional contagion from their subordinates or from their followers than the reverse. And the reason for this seems— is, is when you think about it, is common sense. As a leader or a manager, you have a group of people that report to you And that group will have a dynamic emotion that's kind of the group emotion, and it— that emotion can be overpowering to you because you're only one single brain against 5, 6, 7, 10 other brains. And if those brains are being synced together by emotional contagion, you're gonna— it's like having a wave crash against your brain. And so you, you are going to feel the effects of the group much more powerfully then the group is going to feel your effects. Now, if you're in a group and you have a leader or manager who is angry, one of the— there are many reasons why that superior might be angry, especially if it's chronic anger, but one thing you can think about is what's going on in the group that might be emotionally triggering the boss unconsciously. And it's something to look at and think about. So for example, if the group disrespects the boss because the boss has been a jerk, then there's gonna be an emotional contagion effect that's gonna be created. The boss is gonna pick up on that, and that's just gonna make the boss even more angry. And as a consequence, you're gonna get into a vicious conflict cycle where the anger just becomes more and more chronic acute, and the group suffers, and the group disrespects even more, and the anger gets more intense, and so forth and so on. And you have probably experienced this either as a follower or as a leader, and that's what's going on here. So that about wraps it up, and if you are interested in learning more about emotional contagion and some of the other work that I do, then I invite you to go to my free masterclass, The 5-Step Strategy My Clients Use to Turn Anger into a Competitive Business Advantage. This is free and it's a webinar, and if you want to register and attend the webinar, here's the link: DougNoll.com/5-step-webinar-registration. And you'll learn about the 5-step strategy my clients are using to turn anger into a competitive business advantage and a lot more. And I'll hope to see you there, and thanks for attending. Take care now.