Emotional Contagion: Be Happy!

Following on the last post about the radio interview with Daniel Goleman, today's New York Times contains an essay by Goleman, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers, on the relationship between positive relationships and health. The article describes the discovery of "mirror neurons" in our brains that cause us to adopt the emotional state of those surrounding us. Goleman elaborates:

Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

The article goes on to assert that emotional closeness allows the biology of one person to affect the biology of another to a greater extent. In essense, the greater the level of intimacy between two people, the greater the emotionally uplifting effect their presence can have on each other. This leads to the finding cited in the article that "the emotional status of our main relationships has a significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and neuroendocrine activity."

For me, the concepts of neural mirrors and emotional contagion shed scientific insight into the notion expressed in the following passage from the Bahá'í Writings, articulated so simply and elegantly by 'Abdu'l-Bahá:

I want you to be happy . . . to laugh, smile and rejoice in order that others may be made happy by you.

In another passage, 'Abdu'l-Bahá alludes to the implications of the principle of contagion for education:

Education must be considered as most important, for as diseases in the world of bodies are extremely contagious, so, in the same way, qualities of spirit and heart are extremely contagious. Education has a universal influence, and the differences caused by it are very great.

The parallels between these long standing teachings of the Bahá'í Faith and the cutting-edge discoveries of science continually amaze me. The last quotation from Abdu'l-Bahá seems to point to an even deeper implication of the concept of contagion--that beyond affecting our health or mood in a particular circumstance, the contagious influence of those who surround us has a profound effect on our spiritual and moral development, particularly in the case of long-standing relationships. It certainly is something to ponder!