Tracking the Spread of Emotions

Measuring the subjective experience of emotions (as compared with their visible, biological, or neurological manifestations) requires asking people how they are feeling. One of the more systematic ways of doing this is known as the experience-sampling method. This method uses a series of alerts (such as signals sent to a beeper or cell phone) at unexpected times to prompt subjects to document their feelings, thoughts, and actions while they are experiencing them.²³ The result is a thorough picture of the ups and downs of subjects’ daily emotional lives.

One of the advantages of this method is that it allows groups of interacting people to be evaluated simultaneously in real time. For example, one team of investigators, interested in the spread of emotions within families, outfitted fifty-five families (consisting of a mother, father, and one adolescent) with beepers for one week. The participants were beeped roughly every 90 to 120 minutes between 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m., and a total of 7,100 time points were observed in these 165 individuals. Various emotional states were measured, such as whether the subjects were happy or unhappy. Although the investigators could not rule out the possibility that the entire family was simultaneously exposed to one thing that made them all sad or happy at once (a confounding effect that we will discuss in greater detail in chapter 4), they did try to tease out how emotions spread within these families.

The strongest path was from daughters to both parents, while, conversely, the parents’ emotional state appeared to have no effect on their daughters. Fathers’ emotions affected their wives and their sons but not their daughters. This appeared to be especially true when fathers returned from work: when dad came home in a lousy mood, he soon made the whole household miserable.²⁴

A similar method has been used to examine the transmission of emotions among teams of nurses, athletes, and even accountants.²⁵ In such professional settings, a key question was whether one fired-up team member could improve the mood and thus the performance of his teammates. Not surprisingly, positive mood is associated with a range of team-performance-enhancing changes, including greater altruistic behavior, increased creativity, and more efficient decision making. A nice demonstration involved outfitting thirty-three professional male cricket players with pocket computers that recorded their moods four times a day during a match (which can have the insane duration of five days). There was a strong association between a player’s own happiness and the happiness of his teammates, independent of the state of the game; further, when a player’s teammates were happier, the team’s performance improved.

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