Contagious emotions
You’re probably familiar with the way an encounter with a grump can pull your mood down, or seeing a happy face can perk you up. This article from the Washington Post describes the way humans transmit both positive and negative moods. This is really cool: it’s part of an unconscious process of synchronization with those around us. We mimic the facial expressions of others and that signals our brains to feel the emotions that our faces are expressing. (It reminds me of what William James said about emotion, that maybe your body reacts to something with, for example, a racing pulse and a dry mouth, and the emotion of fear arises only after we feel and interpret that physical reaction.) It’s really interesting to speculate about why humans are able to do this. I can certainly see why it would be beneficial for a group to be on the same emotional wavelength, especially in situations where they’re depending on each other for survival, but on the other hand there are times when it gets out of hand (I’m thinking of mobs).
“I can certainly see why it would be beneficial for a group to be on the same emotional wavelength, especially in situations where they’re depending on each other for survival, but on the other hand there are times when it gets out of hand (I’m thinking of mobs).”
Actually, mob violence can be a useful survival behavior itself. It also helps with social cohesion. There’s no contradiction there.
A little diversion into Benford/Brin/Bear dementia… It seems to me like ‘contagious emotions’ provide an analog to neurotransmission. Consider each individual to be a neuron, and each mood to be a signal. When one individual is exposed to another that has activated, say, “grumpy”, that increases your activation potential for “grumpy”. I *think* it is a good strong analogy.
Why doesn’t this imply the existence of a memetic (or moodetic?) group consciousness that we could meet and have discussions with (if only we could find its mouth)? Because the “thinking” kind of neuronal systems we know and love all depend on a degree of differentiation. Some parts of the brain deal with memory, other parts with language, and so on. There doesn’t appear to be such a differentiation in people. Though…wouldn’t it be neat if there was?
I wonder if the future will bring a good understanding of the uh ‘moodetic network’ that *does* exist though. Biorhythms anyone?
Hamsterbaffle: Good point! I was confusing “useful for survival” and “generally desirable”, and of course they’re not always the same thing.
Greg: I like the analogy. Maybe a difference is that we have at least a little control over what we transmit, and we can try to identify and avoid the negative transmitters, but maybe we have less control than I’m thinking we do. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I read an article about the Internet and human communication (http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/17/internet/). It closed with some speculation about the Internet merging with individual “shells” of AI/software that people will use to interface with the outside world, creating a “global nervous system”. Gaia’s brain?