Mood Drivers

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
by Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.

(Page 3 of 3)

While visiting a certain region of the country, I remember being pleasantly surprised by the friendly tones of the taped voice on the telephone that informed me, "Your call cannot be completed as dialed."

The warmth in that bland recorded message, believe it or not, gave me a small trill of good feeling-due largely to my years of irritation with that same message as delivered by my own regional phone company's computerized voice back home. For some reason, the technicians who programmed that message had decided that a grating, hectoring tone hit the right note, perhaps as an immediate punishment for misdialing.

I had grown to resent the obnoxious tones of that taped message-it brought to my mind the image of a too-prissy, judgmental busybody. Without fail, it put me in a bad mood, if just for a moment.

The emotional power of such subtle cues can be surprising. Consider a clever experiment done with student volunteers at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Students listened to a taped voice reading the driest of intellectual material, a German translation of the British philosopher David Hume's Philosophical Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The tape came in two versions, either happy or sad, but so subtly inflected that people were unaware of the difference unless they explicitly listened for it.

As muted as the feeling tones were, students came away from the tape either slightly happier or slightly more somber than they had been before listening to it. Yet the students had no idea that their mood had shifted, let alone why.

The mood shift occurred even when the students performed a distracting task-putting metal pins into holes in a wooden board-as they listened. The distraction, it seems, created static for the high road, hampering intellectual understanding of the philosophical passage. But it did not lessen a whit how contagious the moods were: the low road stayed wide open.

One way moods differ from the grosser feeling of emotions, psychologists tell us, has to do with the ineffability of their causes: while we typically know what has triggered an outright emotion, we often find ourselves in one or another mood without knowing its source. The Würzburg experiment suggests, though, that our world may be filled with mood triggers that we fail to notice-everything from the saccharine Muzak in an elevator to the sour tone in someone's voice.

For instance, take the expressions we see on other people's faces. As Swedish researchers found, merely seeing a picture of a happy face elicits fleeting activity in the muscles that pull the mouth into a smile. Indeed, whenever we gaze at a photograph of someone whose face displays a strong emotion, like sadness, disgust, or joy, our facial muscles automatically start to mirror the other's facial expression.

This reflexive imitation opens us to subtle emotional influences from those around us, adding one lane in what amounts to a brain-to-brain bridge between people. Particularly sensitive people pick up this contagion more readily than most, though the impervious may sail through even the most toxic encounter. In either case, this transaction usually goes on undetected.

We mimic the happiness of a smiling face, pulling our own facial muscles into a subtle grin, even though we may be unaware that we have seen the smile. That mimicked slight smile might not be obvious to the naked eye, but scientists monitoring facial muscles track such emotional mirroring clearly. It's as though our face were being preset, getting ready to display the full emotion.

This mimicry has a bit of biological consequence, since our facial expressions trigger within us the feelings we display. We can stir any emotion by intentionally setting our facial muscles for that feeling: just clench a pencil in your teeth, and you will force your face into a smile, which subtly evokes a positive feeling.

Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this principle. He wrote: "When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression."

Catching Emotions

The scene: Paris, 1895. A handful of adventurous souls have ventured into an exhibition by the Lumiìre brothers, pioneers in photography. For the first time in history, the brothers are presenting to the public a "moving picture," a short film depicting-in utter silence-a train chugging into a station, spewing steam and charging toward the camera.

The audience's reaction: they scream in terror and duck under their seats.

People had never before seen pictures move. This utterly naïve audience could not help but register as "real" the eerie specter on the screen. The most magical, powerful event in film history may well have been these very first moments in Paris, because the realization that what the eye saw was merely an illusion had not registered with any of the viewers. So far as they-and their brain's perceptual system-were concerned, the images on the screen were reality.

As one movie critic points out, "The dominating impression that this is real is a large part of the primitive power of the art form," even today. That sense of reality continues to ensnare filmgoers because the brain responds to the illusion created by the film with the same circuitry as it does to life itself. Even onscreen emotions are contagious.

Copyright © 2006 by Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.

About the Author

Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., is the author of the worldwide bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence, and is co-author of Primal Leadership. Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for his journalistic work covering the brain and behavioral sciences published in The New York Times, he is currently co-chair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence at Rutgers University and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.