The Danger of Emotional Contagion

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How much is the conversation in the workplace about coronavirus? Has your company asked employees to work from home more often? How worried are you about your kids in school and them being. Impacted. These are all emotional moments on varying levels, and there's a concern about something called emotional contagion impacting how we are reading the conversations around Coronavirus.

Sigal Barad is a management professor here at the Wharton School. She's actually looking at the issue in research she's currently doing, and she joins us on the phone right now. Sigal great to talk to you again. Great to talk to you too. Okay, let's start with what exactly Emo emotional contagion. Sure. So emotional contagion is the phenomenon that we.

Literally almost, you know, we, we catch emotions from one another. And, um, and it's funny because it's often considered in sort of a, a viral model. And the way, the way that it works is that, um, you know, one person. Is, let's say smiling or very tense. And it's a largely automatic process. And so what happens is we catch each other's facial expression and body language and tone through something called behavioral mimicry, which is, uh, infants as young as six weeks old do this.

And so we're really kind of bred to do this. And so we mimic the other people and. Through a variety of physiological processes, we actually feel the emotion that we've just mimicked. Now, what makes emotional contagion, um, so problematic, particularly when it's negative emotional contagion, is that what our studies have shown is that we don't realize it is happen.

And so what happens is that we, you know, we're feeling that emotion and we don't think, oh, you know, I'm really worried about the coronavirus because I've just, you know, heard my workmates talk about it for the past 20 minutes. It's all I heard about on the news, on the way in and out. You know, we, we think, oh, wow.

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