You caught something today without noticing it. Maybe a colleague's anxiety before the meeting even started, maybe a friend's laugh you could not hold back. Your brain runs a continuous transmission system that broadcasts your emotional state to everyone near you, and you cannot switch it off.
Learn more, get certified, take the Personal Threat Profile, and book 1:1 coaching at brainwiseenterprises.com.
What you get in this episode:
- Why the early afternoon is the contagion hour, and why the "post-lunch dip" name is wrong
- The suprachiasmatic nucleus, the 12-hour alertness harmonic, and what happens to inhibitory control in the trough
- Robert Provine's finding that laughter runs about 30 times more frequently in company than alone
- The two separate brain systems behind spontaneous laughter and performed social laughter
- Billing and colleagues on empathy, auditory-motor mirroring, and how contagious a laugh feels
- Caruana and Rizzolatti on the mirroring mechanism that maps hearing a laugh onto producing one
- Why contagious yawning tracks social bonding rather than tiredness, and why suppressing a yawn suppresses an empathy signal
- Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson's 1993 definition of emotional contagion and the mimicry mechanism beneath it
- Sigal Barsade's ripple effect research on how one person's mood reshapes a whole team
- Why a leader's state spreads further and faster than anyone else's
- How the participation and protection drivers determine who catches what
Rate, review, and follow us at @mybrainwisecoach. It genuinely helps other people find the show.
00:00 The Two O'Clock Recording Experiment
02:29 Welcome And Episode Roadmap
03:31 Circadian Dip And Inhibitory Control
06:34 Laughter As A Social Signal
08:28 Contagious Laughter And Mirror Systems
10:37 Contagious Yawning And Empathy
13:57 Emotional Contagion Research Foundations
15:50 Emotional Contagion In Organizations
18:08 Who Catches What And Why
20:18 Practical Field Guide Three Actions
21:43 You Are Never Not Transmitting
23:04 Closing Thoughts And Sign Off
- Provine, R. R. (2000). Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Viking Penguin. The 30-times-more-frequent-in-company figure checks out.
- Billing, A. D. N., Cooper, R. J., & Scott, S. K. (2021). Pre-SMA activation and the perception of contagiousness and authenticity in laughter sounds. Cortex, 143, 57–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.06.010
- Caruana, F., Avanzini, P., Pelliccia, V., Mariani, V., Zauli, F., Sartori, I., Del Vecchio, M., Lo Russo, G., & Rizzolatti, G. (2020). Mirroring other's laughter. Cingulate, opercular and temporal contributions to laughter expression and observation. Cortex, 128, 35–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.02.023
- Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770953
- Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094912
- Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. PNAS, 111(24), 8788–8790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111
