Emotions are contagious. If you’ve ever been to a theatre to watch a comedian perform his schtick and found yourself guffawing along with the rest of the crowd, you’ve experienced the power of psychological mirroring.
People are social animals, and elements of our behavior – while acted out individually – are prompted socially. We take our cues from others and get swept up into emotional and physical actions that might otherwise never occur. When it’s scary we call it mass-hysteria, panic, riot, or mob violence; when it’s fun, joint laughter, mass-entertainment, and team building.
Social behavior is not limited to people. Herd animals panic and stampede together, and lemmings even will follow a leader into the sea. The contagion of emotional behavior powerfully directs the course of events, and in the case of people, drives economies, cultural trends, attitudes, politics, food preferences, bigotries, and style.
In it’s worst manifestations, emotional contagion produces cultish behavior. When a charismatic but psychotically, malignant dissociative personality is influential, others begin to mirror those psychotic behaviors. Submersion of individual personalities under the spell of psychological mirroring has generated acts of genocide, lynching, and mass-suicide. Such episodes are little affected by rationality; they are the result of emotional forces deeply embedded in the human psyche.
This contagious dynamic has been observed within families, where the psychotic behavior of one individual infects the other family members. Notably, when the affective individual is removed, the others revert to their previously non-psychotic selves, as if a magic spell has been lifted. This theme is present in many folk tales, masked within stories of witchcraft, curses, and magic dispelled by the single kiss or word of an innocent.
We can observe the importance of psychological mirroring in our current presidential election. Two charismatic figures are striving to infect the electorate with their psychology. On one side we have an angry, revengeful, fearmongering, man spinning stories of Haitians eating the family cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio. On the other we have a joyful, forgiving, laughter-engendering woman talking about compassion and kindness. One seeks to infect others with paranoia and the other to infect others with trust. And the contagion is spreading.
Neurologically, the discovery of mirror neurons helps explain how emotional contagion happens. Mirror neurons in the brain fire both when an action is taken, and when the actions of others are observed or imagined. So fundamental are mirror neurons that newborn babies imitate their mother’s facial expressions. Thus, researchers believe that the role of mirror neurons in people may be associated with learning and, it’s speculated, with empathy. Audience reactions and identification with characters in films or theatre may be associated with mirror neurons.
People are not machines, however. The complexity of human consciousness still eludes any mechanical explanation; people inhabit common symbolic spaces, an arena of ideas and concepts filling the social sphere into which we are born. In this way, the collective products of human imagination precede and pre-form individual thought, despite our valued sense of self and originality. What we bring to the table is the reality of our internal emotional life, yet even that cannot be disconnected from the emotional impacts of others.
Earth’s living system is exactly that, a system; while we may examine the system part by part, it functions always as a whole and our species is as inseparable from it as we are from each other, displaying the behavior of a single living organism.
