Why the Brain Mirrors Other People’s Emotions

What do we do if someone sends us a negative cue? How do we stop it from hijacking our emotions? How do we make sure that we're internalizing it and not letting us throw us off our game? Luckily, there is amazing research from Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA. He devised a very interesting experiment. He brought people into his lab and he put them in fMRIs, scanned their brain, and he showed them pictures of fearful and angry faces. What he found is that when people were in the scanner and they saw the picture of a fearful or angry face, they in fact caught the emotion. That part of their amygdala that is very fear-based also lit up. In this way, emotions are contagious. If we see someone show us an angry face or a scared face, we catch that anger or fear. But here's the best part: when he taught them to say or label anger, fear, it disengaged the amygdala. It made it so that those participants no longer felt angry and afraid. In this way, learning how to label cues is super empowering. It's the only way that we can stop that hijacking process.