Contagious Emotions

I'm taking a class online through Coursera.org called Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence (if you're not familiar with this website definitely check it out).  Last week's topic was on contagious emotions and while I always knew how the emotions of others affected me I was surprised by the scientific studies that had been conducted on the subject.

A basic synopsis of the readings and the videos I watched was that people mimic the emotions of other people.  Everyone has had an experience where they subconsciously mimicked the emotions of another person. Think about a time where you interacted with someone who was miserable, did you leave feeling more miserable than when you had arrived?  On the flip side, a time when you had an interaction with someone who was friendly and upbeat.  You probably felt happy when you departed from their company.  Now think about how your emotions are affecting others.  When you snap at your co-worker because you are tired or when you smile at your co-worker and genuinely ask how their weekend was.  Both of those interactions carry a lot of emotion with them and can change the emotion of the other person.  I've tried to take this lesson into my everyday life and not only try to influence people's emotions positively but to recognize how the emotions of others are affecting me.  There is one very important part to this though and it is that your emotion must be genuine.  People are not stupid and can very easily pick up if you are being fake happy.  Take a moment before you walk into work tomorrow to take a deep breath and think about the emotions you want to spread to others, hopefully it will help put you in the right mindset for the rest of the day.

So what do you think?  Ever picked up a positive or negative emotion from someone else?  Ever changed the emotion of someone else?

Here is one of the articles if you would like to read it.