Operating almost entirely on an unconscious level, four mechanisms give force and power to emotional pollution. In fact, the four mechanisms - contagion, attunement, negative bias, and reactivity -- govern most human interactions.
Contagion
How do we know what they mean on the news when they say things like "the mood of the nation," or "the feel of the community?" These are metaphors that make no literal sense. Yet we understand perfectly what they mean, thanks to our intuitive awareness of emotional contagion. That's what makes you feel what the rest of the group feels. It's why experiments show that you are more likely to get impatient at a bus stop if other people are and wait more calmly if others seem resigned to the fact that the bus is late. And it's why the "electricity in the air" will get you excited at a sporting event, even if you were not particularly interested in the outcome of the game.
To understand the power of emotional contagion you only have to consider its survival advantage in early human history. Sharing group emotions gives us multiple eyes, ears, and noses with which to sense danger and opportunity. Hence it is common to all social animals - packs, herds, prides, and, in the case of early humans, tribes. When one member of the group becomes aggressive, frightened, or interested, the others do, too. Witnessing the fear or distress of another person in a group can easily invoke the same emotional state within us. Happy people at a party make us happy, caring people make us care, and the interested attract our interest. We avoid those who carry "chips on their shoulders" and those who "bring us down" or "make us anxious." And sporting events that lack at least a few excited spectators tend to bore us.
Like anything that affects emotional states, contagion greatly influences thinking. Opinion pollsters know that they get one set of responses to questions they ask of people in groups and another when they ask the same questions of individuals in private. It's not that these people are lying when in a group or that they change their minds when they're alone. It's more accurate to say that, at least on some issues, they have different public and private minds, due to the influence of emotional contagion.
The principle of contagion also accounts for "group think," which makes people act collectively against their own better judgment. The high-risk behavior of teen gangs occurs as emotional contagion spurs each kid to move far beyond his or her personal inhibitions. Similarly, corporate and governmental scandals reveal how otherwise good people can get swept up in a frenzy that overrides their personal morality. Emotional contagion produces solidarity parades, protest marches and, on the ugly side, "mob justice," lynching, riots, and looting. On a less dramatic level, it gives us constantly changing fashions, cultural fads, and political correctness.
Attunement
Attunement is a special kind of contagion that operates on a more intimate level. It automatically matches the intensity and tone of your emotions with those of someone else. In other words, you feel that person.
Social convention establishes norms for the range and intensity of emotional display. For example, you might feel like screaming on the subway when you read in the paper that your team blew the game on the last play, after you thought it was already won and went to bed. But you won't scream on the subway, just as you probably won't tell jokes at a funeral, even if you feel the dreary atmosphere could use some levity. As long as we stay within the boundaries of social convention, our bodies literally tune our emotions to one another. On those few occasions when you are consciously aware of it, it feels like your emotions are on the same "frequency" and "hit the same notes" as those of another person. They actually do synchronize. If you stop to think about it (and you usually don't) you know what the other person is feeling, because, in a very real way, you're feeling it, too.
Although our unconscious sensitivity to others is almost always active when we're not alone, it is not always accurate, i.e., we sometimes misconstrue what other people are feeling. However, we are far more accurate in sensing what others feel than in knowing what they think. This disproportionate accuracy between sensing another's feelings and judging their thinking leads to most of our misunderstandings of one another. Because we can pretty reliably tell when someone is, say, uncomfortable, we feel justified in guessing, albeit with far less accuracy, why they are uncomfortable or what their discomfort means. You might assume that your partner is aloof because he is irritated with you (or because you are irritated with him), when in reality he was still reacting to a harsh word his boss said to him before he left work. Attunement makes it pretty safe to assume what another is feeling but perilous to guess at what they are thinking or what their feelings mean to them.
Attunement begins with the first stirrings of life, as newborns naturally tune their emotions to those of their caregivers and vice versa - just try reading the paper when your baby is crying or calming her down when you're upset. When parents are anxious, infants are anxious, and when parents feel loving, their babies feel loving, too, as long as they're not experiencing physical discomfort. Throughout the lifespan, sensitivity to the internal experience of loved ones is the cornerstone of empathy, compassion, support, romance, and intimacy.
Unfortunately, the force of attunement is more powerful with negative emotions, such as resentment, annoyance, anxiety, or anger than with the positive emotions, which brings us to the third principle of emotional interactivity: negative bias. See the next post.
CompassionPower
