Are feelings contagious?
Do we mirror the feelings of those we follow on social media?
I can still remember it vividly – laying on my bed in our brownstone apartment in late March 2020. We had been sent home from work a few weeks prior, and the rest of the country followed suit in the coming days. I had already begun to tune out the near-constant sirens heading to the hospital down the block. A pile of bandanas were fresh from the laundry – our version of impromptu masks. I refreshed my Instagram feed, my news app, my email. It all brought me despair and confusion, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.
A text from my best friend: “This will all be over soon right? Next week? It’s just a bad cold.”
I agreed because I couldn’t imagine things would get worse. I wanted to find a glimmer of optimism.
“Yes, yes. Maybe two more weeks”
I refreshed my feed more. The pit in my stomach grew.
These were early days. Before the social distancing signs cropped up in our local park and the grocery store, before the divisive mask mandates, before George Floyd, before the protests. Before the numbers rose and rose and rose.
I read every post catastrophizing the situation, belittling the situation, declaring it’s a hoax, rumblings of the apocalypse. I went into our backyard and heard the sirens roar. I tried to stay calm, but everyone on my phone – my only access to the outside world – seemed to be in a panic.
Then, a tradition began. Across the city, at 7 PM every night, a cheer rang out. Neighbors opened their windows, stepped onto their balconies, popped into their gardens and they clapped and whooped and banged their pots – all as a thank you to the essential workers, doctors, nurses, and hospital staff who continued to trudge out into the scary world.
And with that, I felt hope rising within me.
The pandemic of 2020 was an extreme experience, one I hope we don’t repeat again. Thinking back on that time, I consider how contagious feelings really are.
If I had read the newspaper once a day and didn’t have access to social media, would I have felt the same overwhelming despair that consumed me during those days? Would I have found the same hope if not for our city-wide daily cheer? How were my feelings during that time shaped by the time I spent consuming the news and social media? How many feelings were truly my own?
Emotional Contagion
It turns out that there’s a term for this — emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is the process by which emotions and related behaviors spread from one person to another, or within a group (NCBI). From Technology and Emotions [David B. Shank]: “Human neurological developments, however, preferenced emotion first and rationality later, leading to an asymmetrical relationship between the two: emotions often influence, overwhelm, or bypass rational thinking, whereas rational thinking is slower, more systematic, and less influential over emotions.”
Emotional contagion seems to be a fairly well-accepted reality of human nature, and to interpret Shank, we’re more influenced by emotions than rational thought. A bit daunting, considering how subconscious it all is.
The pandemic, election cycles, even intense sports games – these are all times of heightened emotionality. But what about day-to-day, average events – how do these affect us?
If an influencer I follow is mad at her husband, might I start to feel a bit irked at mine? When you see a TikTok complaining about the hustle culture, are you more likely to be triggered when your boss asks you to put in overtime? Conversely, when you see someone consistently outputting gratitude or kindness, are you more inclined to be more thankful, be kind to others?
I stumbled upon a book from two decades ago – well before social media really evolved into what it is today – and I found an insight that, in hindsight, is quite predictive. In Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society, Richard Stivers writes “The media are the paramount source of information for most people...reality appears to be in the media…The media objectify experience because they deny imagination and the application of symbols to one’s own experience”
What Stivers is describing specifically is the media of the time – film, television, the nightly news. He did not know that in twenty years, most Americans would get a good majority of their information, their content, from social media.
He continues in the book, “The primary impact of visual images is emotional. Indeed, the media provide us with a series of vicarious experiences that make our own lives pale by comparison... The media objectify experience because they deny imagination and the application of symbols to one’s own experiences.”
I’m curious how this idea scales to social media. It’s interesting to me because we are consuming small, curated snippets of other people’s (often stranger’s) real lives. The experience is objective. So how can our emotions manage this barrage of experiences, without our ability to, as Stivers would put it, apply the symbols of our own experience? If emotional contagion is inevitable, is our only path forward to control what we are consuming?
What we consume
We have never, in the history of time, been inundated with as much information as we are today. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari writes, “The raw figures on this have been analyzed by two other scientists, Dr. Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California and Dr. Priscilla López at the Open University of Catalonia. Picture reading an eighty-five-page newspaper. In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being-TV, radio, reading—it amounted to 40 newspapers worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day.” This was 2007! Imagine how this data would be scaled today with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit.
How much of the content that we consume evokes a positive response from users? We know that social media amplifies anger – algorithms prioritize content that elicits a strong response, most often that is anger or misinformation.
What I’m saying is this – we are consuming a ridiculous amount of content on the Internet, and inherently, the Internet has become a negative place. So maybe, if I’m catching feelings, it’s better for them to be positive, from real world experiences.
When I look back at my circumstances during the pandemic, it was the media that I was consuming — both the sheer amount and the content itself — that heightened my anxiety to extreme levels. What gave me hope, what lifted my spirits, were the acts of the humans around me, the real-world experience of being part of a community.
Hi reader. In the coming weeks, I’m launching a new reader Q&A series. If you have a question about digital minimalism or starting your own journey to break free from the internet, shoot me a message at the link below.