Over Time, People ‘Catch Mood’ of Friends, Lovers
It seems that couples and roommates tend to have similar emotional reactions as time goes by. So if your roommate or lover laughs out loud at movies or gets weepy over hurt puppies, you may too — given time.
This so-called emotional convergence seems to be beneficial to friendships and romantic relationships, making them stronger and longer lasting.
Everyday experience suggests that people are capable of “catching” the mood of a spouse or friend, said lead author Dr. Cameron Anderson. But he told Reuters Health that he was surprised by the extent to which peoples’ emotions converged in his study, which is reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Yahoo! News
As the article points out, however, an alternative explanation is that similarity of emotional reactions may predispose for relationship persistence. The study did not demonstrate that reactions become more similar over time, longitudinally. If its hypothesis is true, however, one way to think about this is to reconceptualize emotions as properties of the interpersonal field rather than the individuals. Not a novel concept in psychiatry; for example, it is the grounding of many family interaction theories with enduring psycholigical pedigree, and of revered psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullvan’s interpersonal psychiatry. This way of thinking about things also resonates with the new neurobiological findings about our emotional resonance circuitry to which I point in the post below this one.
Curious why it is a visceral human tendency to ‘own’ emotions as internal rather than conceive of them interpersonally. One possibility — it certainly seems important to draw distinct boundaries of the self and sort phenomena into definitively into ‘mine’ and ‘not-mine.’ There are serious consequences of the failure to do that. I have long argued that extreme social dysfunction such as schizophrenia is first and foremost a disorder of this boundary-drawing function, which by the way has its own neurobiological circuitry. Not agreeing with the consensus notions of where you end and the rest of the world begins is a profoundly alienating and alarming existential state.
