If you’re happy, I’m happy
Have you ever met someone for the first time who was so overly enthusiastic and happy that you could not help but immediately smile and feel happy yourself? Some might call this politeness but studies show that reaction might be something akin to a reflex. In fact, some research which suggest that the saying “happiness is contagious” is truer than first suspected.
One study looked to see if gender effected the susceptibility a person was to being “infected” by the emotions of another. The premise of this research came from the previous research of Hatfield et al. who hypothesized that people automatically and almost subconsciously repeat and experience the emotions we see on people we are interacting with. In other words, if you are interacting with someone who is happy, you are likely to also become happy and respond back to them with happiness. In order to find out which gender had the stronger reaction, researchers presented participants with photos from the “Pictures of facial affect” and asked them to rate the strength in which they themselves experienced the emotion that they just saw. Now, while the results pertaining to the difference between genders did not show any significant difference in level of “infection”, both genders experience significant amounts of similar responses when confronted with another person and their emotions. Specifically stronger emotions were gaged as having stronger reactions. These emotions included happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear and pleasure.
These results also match up with other research which suggests that people who come into contact with other happy people tended to be happier. This research came from Harvard and UC San Diego and polled 4,700 individuals over the course of 20 years. The results from this research suggest that simply knowing someone who is happy can boost the likelihood that you will be happy by 15%. As such it would seem that happiness really is contagious.
However, as the first study showed, so are other emotions. Could it also not be said that sadness would and could spread at the same rate, or perhaps even stronger depending on the degree of sadness? Does the person’s level of emotion have on impact on how strongly another will react to them? Is it possible to thus manipulate someone into feeling something they did not initially feel, or is it necessary that they have an inkling of the feeling within themselves? Food for thought.
-Cassey
SOURCES
http://www.fresnocohousing.com/pdfs/happiness-research-lat.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178101002256
http://westsidetoastmasters.com/resources/laws_persuasion/chap10.html
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