Could contagious happy moods save the economy?

Your mother always told you to cover your mouth when you sneeze to prevent others from getting sick. In the age of H1N1, it remains good advice, and reminds us that every mother is an amateur epidemiologist. But if more mothers were amateur economists, they’d probably tell you to cover your mouth when you frown. That’s because doing so could help prevent a recession.

Although human emotions don’t spread quite like colds, they are contagious. And when intense emotions spread rapidly it can contribute to irrational behavior, exaggerating economic highs and lows. An emotional pandemic can blow more air into a bubble, and suck more out during a recession.

“People are mood inductors,” says Wharton professor Sigal Barsade, who was one of the first to study emotional contagion in groups. “We’re social beings, we influence each other.” But, she adds, “We most often don’t realize it’s happening. People are very unaware of where their moods come from.”

Peter Totterdell, a professor at the University of Sheffield in England, says, “If you put two people in a room facing each other, without talking to each other, their moods will converge, or more likely, the mood of the less expressive person will move towards the mood of the more expressive person.”

But it turns out that for emotions to spread, two people don’t have to be in the same room. They don’t even have to know each other. Emotions can be transmitted through mass media and can extend far beyond their originators.

In one experiment, team leaders were shown different videos designed to put them in certain moods, then told to lead groups in tasks. The group members ended up in the same moods as the videos that their respective leaders watched, even though the group members themselves never even watched the videos.