The Field of Connection: Moods and Emotional Contagion

We are contagious to one another in what we think and dream about, as well as in our moods and emotions. This can happen on the subway with strangers or while waiting for a flight in an airport. When we are exposed to the emotions of others around us, they impact our individual states of mind. The impact is more pronounced, however, in our more familiar groupings, in our fields of connection. 

Think about it for a moment.

You can no doubt recall times when someone in a bad mood changed the course of a meeting you were attending, perhaps definitively impacting the decisions that were made or shutting down the process all together. Negative moods and emotions can also have a daily ongoing impact on a team or an organizational environment.  It may be one person who constantly ‘rains’ on everyone’s parade, or it can be just the way we all pass along our moods to one another, and they go ‘viral.’

In client work, I’ve seen over and over how one person can bring the productivity of a team, a department, or a small organization to its knees.  Toxic emotions from one person can poison the water cooler.  We are that connected.

Thankfully, the impact can go the other way as well. We can spread more positive emotions as well. Why is that important?

In the realm of neuroscience, studies of the brain are showing that the more we focus on problems and a negative mental frame, the more our brains trigger fear responses, embedding the problem thinking in the neural circuitry and lowering our ability to find solutions. [Sharon Begley, How The Brain Is Wired, 01.19.07, TIME]

Research on high performing teams conducted by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada [AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 2005] concluded that the critical variable accounting for the teams’ success was the ratio of positive to negative talk, in excess of 2.9 to 1.  Similar research shows that married couples [5 to 1] and individuals also come closer to flourishing with a higher degree of positive to negative thought and talk.  

Fredrickson has advanced a “broaden and build” hypothesis based on her findings over the past ten years in which she posits that a more positive emotional frame enables us to access greater memory, cognitive skills, and attention.  In addition to healing from old lingering emotional wounds, positive emotions help us become more resilient.  A positive frame allows us to be more in touch with our own strengths, which in turn, helps us attend to and appreciate the strengths of others and see the potential in our situations.  Better for us, better for our organizations, better for our communities. [From Barbara L. Fredrickson, Positivity, 2009.] You can see a sampling of your own positivity ratio on the linked webpage.

Barsade concluded that both kinds of emotion, positive and negative, are highly contagious, but that positive emotions stimulate a group to be cooperative and make more positive choices in decision making, while the reverse held true for negative emotion. [From Lynne McTaggart, The Bond]

So, my mood today and yours, and the way we spread it around, matters to the fields of connection on which we play.