What most people don’t appreciate is the extent to which people influence you emotionally. This spans across every strata of your life and includes intimate relationships, friendships, colleagues and those you hang out with and family.
This exercise is dedicated to showing you how emotional contagion works, where it may be affecting you and what you can do to protect yourself. As defined by Elaine Hatfield, a pioneering researcher within Relationship Science, Emotional Contagion is “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise expressions, vocalisations, postures and movements with those of another person’s and consequently, to converge emotionally.
When we breakdown the circumstances, it becomes apparent how important rapport and intensity of emotion are for facilitating this process. The more rapport you have with someone, the more likely you are to mimic his/her behaviour and feel his/her emotions. Likewise the stronger the emotion, the more impact the transfer would have on you.
Most of them, younger than me, lost their jobs for various reasons, but from my observation, they are dishonest. They smuggle, engaged in extortion and racketeering. They shamelessly enter beer parlours expecting you to pay for them. They like to blame their incompetence on bad governance.