Emotions can pass from one person to another as easily as a cold. Here’s how to stay balanced and free from the negative vibes.
Is Stress Contagious? Studies Say Yes—And Here’s How to Deal With It
I can detect my husband’s stress in the way he walks; my nine-year-old daughter’s anger in her low drawn-out moan. Within a matter of minutes, this surface tension has caused my own jaw to clench. These days, emotions fly around our house like a fast-moving game of ping pong—it’s so easy to absorb someone else’s bad mood and then deflect that negative energy onto the next person. With the pandemic forcing us into close quarters, the threat of “catching” someone else’s stress, be it from family members, roommates, or even social interactions online seems ever present. This spiraling, I was thankful to learn, is not all in my head—it’s actually backed by science: A large body of evidence shows that stress is a form of so-called “emotional contagion” and can, in fact, spread among members in a group remarkably quickly—and have a lingering effect that lasts for hours, even days.
“We naturally catch other people’s emotions unconsciously, just like we might a cold,” says Laurie Santos, Ph.D., a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale University who hosts The Happiness Lab podcast. “We are much more affected by the people around us than we might think, in terms of behaviors and habits.” Research shows that watching people going through a stressful ordeal—such as giving a presentation and performing mental arithmetic in front of others—can raise the heart rate and cortisol levels in the observers, says Tony Buchanan, Ph.D., co-director of the Neuroscience Program at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, who helped developed a research paradigm, the Emphatic Trier Social Stress Test, to illustrate this phenomenon. The ripple effect, he says, is hardwired into our biology for survival. “In animals who live in groups, such as humans, your chances of survival are greater if you pay attention to others’ stress, as a warning sign of danger, and mobilize internal resources to get your muscles working to flee that situation,” he explains.
Today the threat of being eaten by a predator is pretty much non-existent but we still pick up on these signals—even in very subtle ways. Jaideep Bains, Ph.D., a professor of physiology and a principal investigator of the Stressynomics lab at the University of Calgary, Canada, has found that stressed mice emit an odor, an “alarm pheromone,” that’s detected by other mice, which could explain the pathway of emotional contagion in us, too. “The circuits of the brain that respond to stress are similar in mice and humans,” he says. Interestingly, our coping mechanisms might differ by sex, though—in a study when female mice shared their stress with a partner, their stress levels decreased, but the same was not true of male mice. The takeaway: Calming methods are not universal—what works for you might not comfort others.
In my house, screen time and scrolling Instagram is often an escape from negative vibes, but virtual interactions can also elicit a stress response, finds Stephanie Dimitroff, Ph.D, a clinical neuropsychology researcher at The University of Konstanz, Germany. In a 2017 study, Dimitroff recruited college-age volunteers, hooked them up to EKG monitors and had them watch a series of videos of people experiencing different levels of stress. “The observers’ heart rate changed based on the stress level of the videos, and it synchronized faster if the person had a high level of affective empathy—or the ability to automatically feel the emotions of those around you,” she says. This might explain why watching the news induces panic among many, and less avoidable screen time, such as sitting on lengthy Zooms with angsty co-workers, can also leave you feeling keyed up.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Kari Molvar
