Stop the Spread of Negative Emotional Contagion! Emotions flow through society!
Did you ever notice how emotions flow through society from person to person, from group to group, because of the effects of emotional contagion? Emotions have run high in the past few years. They provide the fuel for most controversies that hit the news. Emotions are contagious. They rub off on us from other people. In this way, they are powerful and often determine the outcome of an event, as invisible emotions move among people and drive actions. Protests, marches, riots, convoys, and insurrection attempts are all driven by strong internal feelings and emotions that emerge and circulate among the people. Many topics like abortion, stolen elections, vaccinations, pandemics, shootings, and others often involve contagious toxic emotions in discussions about them. Not all emotions are toxic or negative, but negative contagious emotions underlie the political turmoil in our times. Without these strong negative emotions flowing from person to person, from group to group, we wouldn’t have the turmoil in society and politics. But no one talks about emotions. When we don’t talk about them and how to deal with them, they run amok. We have to Stop the Spread of Negative Emotional Contagion! It is the contagious negative emotions that cause turmoil.
Emotions are surging toward the surface in America over the past few years. When the pandemic hit, they rose closer to the top. There were over a million deaths in the U.S., and this takes a very big toll on us emotionally. Fear and morbidity hit us. We were all faced with a possible lethal illness. There was an increase in anxiety and depression. When negative emotions get strong, they often get out of control. And in politics, people got more emotional. In fact, emotional contagion has run rampant at this time of turmoil in politics over the past few years. Some people panicked. To handle this onslaught of emotions, some people denied their impact, as disinformation about the pandemic that enabled its seriousness flourished. Denial is a common but ineffective way to handle fear. Instead, to prevent and lessen their effect, we need to realize and accept the power of invisible emotion in society in order to motivate us to learn how to manage and regulate emotions. We cant manage emotions if we don’t know they are there.
For example, emotions likely have a major role in bringing about mass shootings. Hate and rage may provide the impetus, and fear, depression, worry, guilt, and more will follow. We have seen the number of mass shootings (defined as four deaths or injuries) annually increase in the past twenty years in the U.S., from an average of 1.8 per year between 1988 and 1992 to 2.0 between 1998 and 2002, then through 3.6 between 2008 and 2012 and then it jumps all the way up to 8.4 between 2018 and 2022. Between 2002 and 2011 there were an average of 2.0 mass shootings a year, but in an equal time span of between 2012 and 2021 there were 7.0 mass shootings a year in the U.S. This would appear to offer support for the observation that emotions are spiking and surging over the top in America in the last few years, both as a cause and as a reaction. this is partly the copycat phenomenon, but it occurs partly because the similar emotions in the perpetrator, the shooter, rise to the surface after a shooting and are absorbed by the copycats, who then go on to act on that absorbed emotion by shooting someone else. We have to handle the situation by creating conditions that will lower hate and rage and reduce the likelihood of absorbing the feelings of hate and rage. People only absorb feelings that are close to the surface.
As well, cynicism grows. If some readers interpret the above comments as lacking support for gun control, this may reflect some cynicism in their minds. Cynicism is common and is often a reaction that becomes a belief of distrust, involving feeling hurt or betrayed. Cynicism, although technically not an emotion, is defined by Cambridge as the belief that people are only interested in themselves and are not sincere: or the fact of using someone’s feelings or emotions to your own advantage: [1] Cynicism is a serious problem because it is often toxic and bad for our physical and mental health. My book Emotions Don’t Think: Emotional Contagion in a Time of Turmoil states that “cynicism is associated with poor health, poor habits, chronic depression, and has even been found to be associated with heart attacks. The BBC reported in 2007[2] that a study from the Archives of Internal Medicine of 6,814 people … suggested that cynical people may be more likely to lead unhealthy lifestyles, like smoking or suffering from obesity, which creates more risk factors for heart disease. Other studies have found that cynicism was associated with an increased risk of total mortality and cancer-related mortality and may be more likely to develop dementia. Cynical people have also been found to make smaller incomes than more optimistic people.
Although not technically an emotion, there is a lot of suspicion in cynicism. This is an example of how emotion runs high in society. Certainly, I am in favor of gun control, as guns and their triggers can be easy ways for the person prone to act out their angry emotions, particularly if they have easy access to a firearm and its bullets. But it is not an either-or situation. It is not either guns or emotions. It is both, and more. There are many factors going into this problem, too many to discuss here. But emotions are a major factor and can be regulated and managed if people knew how. That doesn’t mean people have to change their views on guns. Emotions tend to push some people to an extreme either-or point of view, usually incomplete, due to fast automatic thinking driven by implicit emotion. When people get emotional in their thinking, there is usually a very quick retort in a game of what I call emotional ping-pong, a quick aggressive reply or comment back, when there is no time for thought, not even a few seconds. This escalates as the emotional ping-pong game builds to a crescendo.
And emotions are strongly related to the power of trends in society and popular culture. Here is another segment from my book Emotions Don’t Think: Emotional Contagion in a Time of Turmoil: “The trends of public shaming, cynicism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theories have morphed, as trends involving emotions tend to do, into the popular “cancel culture,” which would seem to be caused by emotional and social contagion. We know that emotions attract and pull for each other, ramping their power up as they feed off of each other. … The power from the emotional flow involved in public shaming, cynicism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theories gets stronger.” It is natural to feel emotions about controversial topics and issues but we need to modify them so they don’t get too strong because when they do there can be a lot of turmoil and even violence. The turmoil comes when people feed off each other’s strong emotions. magnifying them through negative emotional contagion.
When we feel an emotion emanating or exuding from someone else, we often accept it as legitimate and absorb it inside us through emotional contagion and come to let it affect us too. When we are around someone who is angry or read angry statements on social media, we can feel angry too. Do you want to feel angry? Can you manage it or will it get the best of you? It is better to realize that emotional contagion is happening and so develop an inoculation to it, so that we can appraise it and decide if it is positive or negative, destructive or constructive, so that we can decide whether to block it or absorb it, and how to handle it if we absorb it, so that it doesn’t get the best of you. Emotions can be managed.
The emotions of fear and hate are among the strongest, most powerful, destructive emotions that we have and cause many wars. At these times, as weapons and tanks gather at the border between the Ukraine and Russia, it is easy to see how these two emotions can contribute to destruction. Usually, there is a strong fear of the other that drives us to be aggressive and explosive, as if the fear is correct and real. Fear can be real but it may not be based on correct facts. So that would make the fear baseless. (This doesn’t apply to the Ukraine-Russia conflict). And even if it is, the action needs to be strategic, planned, and methodical.
But yet society and the media usually minimize the impact of emotions as such, although they do say how an event was devastating, like the various tragic events over the last few years. But the implicit and sometimes explicit emotion that produced them is often ignored and yet it is one of the most powerful forces at play in life and in the world. This is probably because emotion is invisible, and the media only reports the visible.
One of the things that we have to do as a society is to learn how to regulate and manage our emotions, because emotional dysregulation affects society in a strong way. Emotions that are too strong, experienced implicitly inside us as people and expressed outwardly as actions, cause too many problems when they produce unregulated behavior, like destruction, violence, riots, vandalism, homicides, police brutality, suicides, and even wars. All these actions and others are produced not just by behavior, but by the strong emotion that preceded it, and the thoughts that are associated with the emotion. The strength of emotion provided the motivation and the impetus for the destructive behavior, so we need to learn how to regulate emotions to prevent these behaviors from happening.
People may say they have the freedom to express their emotions and do the behavior they want. That is true but it comes with a limit, and that limit consists of a responsibility to others, a responsibility to contain and regulate one’s emotions and behavior so that they do not result in destruction caused by recklessness or violence. Otherwise, the idea of freedom is only used as an excuse to be violent. This can make a mockery of the precious value of freedom that we all cherish. Freedom comes with a responsibility to handle it carefully and respect its limits. We have a responsibility to others. Self-regulation and emotional regulation help us accomplish that.
By recognizing an emotion is present inside of us, identifying what that emotion is, and predicting what type of behavior it is likely to encourage in ourselves, we can work on regulating it. If we anticipate that the strong feeling inside us is likely to prompt us to act irrationally, we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to swear, accuse someone, punch someone, kiss someone, throw something, or worse, shoot someone? We may feel like it, but do we really want to do it just because we feel like it? When we know that Emotions Don’t Think? The Mind Thinks. It asks, do we want to do this when we know that someone’s feelings could be hurt? Or they could be injured or even killed? You don’t have to hurt someone just because they have been hurtful to you. Especially when we realize how hurting them back could be costly to you in the future. In that way, the other person gets the last laugh by ruining your future life when you could have ha a better life. So are the next few seconds or moments of excitement and elation, on accomplishing something likely destructive, maybe meeting a vengeful feeling’s need, really worth hours, days, weeks, months, years or even decades of guilt and agony and perhaps jail if someone is killed or hurt? Just because it feels like it is worth it for that precise moment doesn’t mean you have to actually do it, because you have a long life of potential rewards and happy moments ahead. You will want to feel joy, happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction, and these feelings may not be ever possible to attain if a destructive act is done in this one brief moment you feel like it. Remind yourself of that at the time you feel like doing something destructive you hadn’t planned to. By talking to yourself you can change your emotion and action. Emotions are the most powerful, invisible, intangible force that emanates from a human being, and it is a contagious and infectious force! People underestimate its power and yet hate and fear motivate wars and attacks! Wars throughout our history have killed millions of people. If people learned how to manage and regulate emotions that come through negative emotional contagion, or from the thoughts that produce them, by putting things into a proper perspective, wars and conflicts could be minimized or even eliminated. Instead, positive emotional contagion, as it spreads between and among people, motivates us to come together. It is a very powerful force, more powerful than words alone. It includes the emotions of love, acceptance, and pride. A mother and her newborn baby use positive emotional contagion to communicate the love they feel. It is an instinct. This is the antidote to negative emotional contagion. When love is spread through positive emotional contagion, it is the greatest force known to human beings. We need to Stop the Spread of Negative Emotional Contagion.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/
[2] Cynicism link with heart disease. BBC News. Jan. 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6289847.stm