All animals, including humans, use emotional displays to interact with one another. Aggression is the most dramatic example. Dogs growl, cats arch their backs, snakes hiss, horses stand up and wave their front legs menacingly, bulls kick sand, apes beat their chests, and humans puff up their muscles. (Early humans use to roar, which is why you talk in a more menacing voice when angry and want to scream in traffic.) There are just as obvious though less dramatic gestures of courtship, affiliation, playfulness, and interest in humans and other social animals.
More recent observations suggest that all social animals, including humans, put out much more subtle emotional signals as well -- most of which are outside conscious awareness -- and that these, too, affect how we interact with one another. Like all social animals, we can pretty much feel when someone is putting out positive or negative emotional energy, even if he or she makes no overt behavioral indication. Although we can't tell what they're thinking, we can read the emotional tone of most people -- whether they are quiet or whether they are shouting -- with a fair degree of accuracy. Of course, the accuracy declines as we move further from loved ones, friends, neighbors, and members of our own culture.
How many times have you asked someone you know, "Is anything wrong?"
"No, nothing's wrong," is the abrupt response. You don't buy it because you know there is something wrong.
Even when we consciously try to shut out our unconscious perceptions of one another, we retain our natural sensitivity to each other's emotions. That's why you feel different when you ignore your spouse, compared to the way you feel when he or she is not in the room with you. It's why you feel different when you're the only one walking down your side of the street, compared to how you feel when the sidewalk is crowded with other people, whom you try to ignore.
This innate sensitivity to one another's emotional states derives from the social nature of our central nervous systems. From the beginning of our time on this planet, humans lived in groups and tribes. We are very much social animals, hard-wired to interact emotionally, in subtle yet profound ways, with everyone we encounter. On a deep, visceral level, we continually draw energy from and contribute energy to a dynamic web of emotion that consists of everyone we interact with and everyone with whom they interact. Each person you pass on the street subtly reacts to you and vice versa. Each person you pass in turn subtly influences each person he or she passes. In the web of emotion, you never react to just one person but to everyone that person has recently encountered.
Whether we like it or not, we are emotionally connected to virtually everyone we encounter. Our only choice is to make the connection positive or negative, to put out compassion or download resentment, to clean up emotional pollution, or contribute to it.
