You’ve read the headlines. Some cheerful (“Gesundheit! The Surprising Case of Emotional Contagion”), others foreboding (“Emotional Contagion Can Take Down You Whole Team”). Maybe you remember Facebook’s unethical secret experiment in 2014, that paved the way for reality-hacking Russian bots and Macedonian teens. Emotional contagion, the phenomenon of “catching” the emotions of the people around you, just feels true.
But in psychological science, it’s not quite that simple. There’s a lot to unpack just in the term “emotional contagion.” Drawing on the work of neuroscientist and emotion researcher Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett (presented in her top-25 of 2018 TED talk and 2017 book, How Emotions Are Made), here are two ways that studying emotional contagion is trickier than you think.
1. Feelings are Not Emotions
Ok, this doesn’t make sense. Of course feelings and emotions are the same. Right? Well according to Dr. Barrett, not exactly. How you feel, whether good or bad, activated or calm, is a distinct thing from the emotion you report experiencing. This basic sense of what you feel, also called by its scientific name “affect,” comes from your brain’s best understanding of what is going on inside your body. In contrast, Dr. Barrett describes an instance of emotion as an integration of what you feel, plus what’s going on around you, plus your memories and concepts about the world in general, all occurring in a moment and wrapped together by a word—an emotion word. This explains why you can feel both an excruciating sadness (like when your dog dies) and pleasant sadness (when listening to a favorite old song). In those moments, you’re labelling both experiences with the word “sad,” but the underlying affect may be totally different.
One issue with emotional contagion, from the perspective of Dr. Barrett’s theory, is that only some studies of emotional contagion actually manipulate emotion. Meanwhile, other studies expose people to faces or individuals that only differ in how positive or negative they are, which is only manipulating the basic and broad feelings of affect. Assuming that affect contagion is the same as emotional contagion confuses feeling generally crummy after talking to your sad coworker, and actually feeling sad.
2. Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Feel?
Even if we understand the difference between affect and emotional contagion, that still doesn’t guarantee that contagion is occurring, or at least that we are measuring it. Many studies, such as this one, are designed to use pictures of faces to induce emotional contagion. The researchers show people an angry face, or a happy face, and then ask them how they feel. If, more often than not, individuals feel angry after angry faces and happy after happy faces, then presto changeo: emotional contagion.
But in the real world, feeling happy when you see someone smiling doesn’t necessarily mean you are feeling the same thing as them. People sometimes smile politely when they are bored, or to conceal discomfort about the tactless joke they just told. As Dr. Barrett put it in her book, “a smile may mean happiness, embarrassment, anger, or even sadness depending on context” (149). In a mountain of studies, Dr. Barrett and her colleagues have shown that humans are terrible at “reading” emotions in the faces of other people. If emotional contagion does exist, it’s impossible to verify its existence by simply measuring behaviors, such as smiling, or only measuring the emotions of one person. Because, despite the claims of emotional contagion, seeing is not feeling.