THE HUMAN CONDITION : CONTAGIOUS MOODS : Do You Feel It Too?

Gary was the life of the party. When he walked into a room something clicked, recalls his friend Vivian.

“You couldn’t have a party without him,” she says. “He just seemed to lift everyone’s mood. I’ve been to some bad parties, but never any bad parties where Gary was there.”

Partially bald, with a small paunch, Coke-bottle glasses, a bouncy posture and a corny, joke-cracking style, Gary’s knack of sparking a party exemplifies a phenomenon that psychologists are only recently recognizing.

While they don’t spread like the flu in January, moods, it seems, can be contagious.

Human-behavior experts are compiling impressive evidence that shows moods drift from person to person via slight, unconscious, unintentional signals, such as facial expressions, posture or tone of voice.

“A person is feeling something and showing it lots of different ways, and you find yourself feeling the same thing. That’s what we mean by contagion,” says Dr. Elaine Hatfield, a University of Hawaii psychologist.

Hatfield, a leading researcher on mood contagion, says she first became interested while conducting therapy sessions.

“It was so surprising to notice with my clients how much I’d catch their emotion. I found I had a terrible problem dealing with depressed clients. I’d catch it right away. I was sinking down and I could barely wake myself up. . . . I’m really impressed with its power.”

It can also be insidious.

Whenever she was around a particularly esteemed and intelligent colleague, Hatfield recalls”feeling like a moron.” She would try to say something intelligent, which he greeted with silence. Then Hatfield would leave, feeling embarrassed.

Finally, she says, “I figured out he was the anxious one.” By presenting an uneasy, stilted demeanor, he spread his anxiety to her.

The moral of this story: You might not be the company you keep, but sometimes you might feel like them.

“I have an aunt who is positively sour,” says Suzie, wrinkling her nose at the recollection of Aunt Elaine. “At every family get-together, people would avoid talking to her. Or they would speak to her politely for a few minutes and then excuse themselves as quickly as possible. I would hear my mom and other aunts conferring about whether Aunt Elaine was in a good mood or bad mood. When she was in a bad mood, she never smiled.”

Researchers say that recognizing the power of moods might help reveal why family relationships become strained, marriages crumble and creative energies fizzle in the workplace.

Mood contagion also might help explain why the first-place team in the middle of the season ends up last, why a smaller battalion defeats the larger army or why a once happy-go-lucky teen-ager becomes despondent.

At the very least, Hatfield says, understanding the contagious nature of emotions might help avoid unwanted moods.

For example, she says, someone like Suzie might plan to spend a week’s vacation with her relatives, resolving to remain cheerful and immune to the turbulence surrounding Aunt Elaine.

But Suzie probably will find she can’t pull it off; the mood will get her.

“You may be determined that you’re going to behave nicely. But your resistance kind of wears down,” Hatfield says. “If your family is always chaotic, you’re going to be caught up with that.”

It’s important that Suzie not blame herself, Hatfield says: “An understanding of how that whole process works, how automatic it is and how little we can stop from getting depressed, allows us to arrange our lives better.”

While one can’t choose one’s family, experts suggest that understanding mood contagion might help people on the job or in other settings make the most of their people power.

Arthur, an active volunteer at his Los Angeles temple, says the reason the temple runs so smoothly has a lot to do with the board president--a man of unending cheerfulness, energy and goodwill.

“People just gravitate to him,” Arthur says.

In professions such as medicine or counseling, in which people care for others, it’s especially important to understand the power of mood contagion, Hatfield says.

Caretakers often have to decipher between mixed messages: what someone says and how they act. A patient might tell her physician she feels great, but her sad face and droopy posture suggest otherwise.

When you’re getting two sources of information, Hatfield says, believe in the feeling you get as receiver: “We tend to believe what people say. But our emotions tend to be almost totally in tune with what the other person is feeling.”

But, she says, caretakers must make sure that catching the mood doesn’t cloud their professional judgment. A depressed psychiatrist would be of little use to a depressed client.

“There is a balance between being able to feel something versus being able to back off and do something about it,” she says.

Not everyone can transmit a mood around a room. And not everyone is a good receiver.

Rather than a conscious thought process, researchers say, mood contagion is ubiquitous.

Hatfield says a mood is spread in steps: A person’s facial expressions, voice and posture are observed by another, who then unconsciously begins to mimic it, thus picking up the mood.

The process is automatic, Hatfield says: “It’s split-second mimicry that goes on.”

Social scientists have long observed the power of mimicry between people. Infants invariably try to duplicate the expression of the person tending them; toddlers cry when they hear another toddler crying.

As people age, however, sensitivity to mood contagion can increase or lessen.

“There are people who can’t help it, they just catch the mood of the person they are with because they are attending so carefully to another person,” Hatfield says. “They are supersensitive barometers.”

Those susceptible to receiving others’ moods often have very sensitive physiological responses, says John Cacioppo, an Ohio State University psychology professor who studies differences in mood contagion. Such people sweat easily, their hearts beat faster and their stomachs churn more easily.

Powerful mood senders usually are very expressive.

Cacioppo says a clear signal is needed for mood contagion: “If there is no indication from a person what mood they’re in, they can’t transmit it. It’s not a supernatural process. It depends on cues.”

Mood contagion also more likely occurs among people who are intimate, says Cris Hsee, who has studied the subject at Yale University.

“The general hypothesis is that contagion is stronger between people who are attached to each other rather than people who are strangers,” says Hsee.

And problems can arise when people are not good senders or receivers, notes Cacioppo: “If you have two people who are not expressive, it’s going to be difficult for them to establish a rapport.”

For example, imagine that a couple came home from work and neither had a clue about how the other felt or what kind of day the other had without actually saying it.

“Neither one would have any cues,” Cacioppo says. “Anything that would have to be negotiated would have to be done verbally. And that is tough to do.”

So, mood contagion can be automatic or completely missing from relationships.

And there is a third possibility. Mood can be rejected by a conscious thought process, Cacioppo says. For example, if someone is sending an amorous mood to someone who is not feeling particularly amorous, it could cause the receiver to flee from the unwanted emotion.

It’s called, Cacioppo notes somberly, “counter-contagion”:

“Just because one person is a good transmitter and one person is a good receiver doesn’t mean there will be a synchronicity in the relationship.”