The Magical Science of Emotions: Emotional Contagion,

Mirror Neurons, and the High Road to Happiness

Mirror Neurons and Emotional States

There is a scientific explanation behind how our emotions – an experience of mind and body –
transfer over to somebody else. In 1980s, three Italian researchers made what is said to be one of
the greatest neuroscience breakthroughs in recent times: discovering the mirror neuron. In an
experiment, the three researchers had electrodes attached to a macaque monkey’s brain which
enabled the researchers to determine what movements caused the neurons to light-up. As the
monkey reached for food, the researchers took note of single neurons being fired. When the
researchers were handing the monkey some food, they unexpectedly saw the monkey’s neurons
fire. By accident, the researchers discovered that when they picked-up a piece of food, the
monkey had the same neurons light-up as if it were picking-up the food. They came to name
these neurons “mirror neurons” because they were like the mind’s mirror.

An amazing, almost mystical link, takes place to connect the brains. A signal sent from either
individual in the psychological connection travels via the link to similarly affect the recipient.
Hatfield says, “We reflect what they feel.” Smile at a baby, or almost anyone for that matter, and
the baby’s mirror neurons will be fired to trigger an automatic smile. That is why the age-old
saying, “smiling causes the whole world to smile with you”, is true. Not only is emotional
contagion a replication of another’s emotions, but it is a biological dance – a shared physical
connection. It is an interlinking of mind and body.

Another age-old theory of staying away from toxic people – because they will pull you down
with them – is now a physiological and psychological fact. Being around suppressing or uplifting
people directly affects your body and mind. We were born for interaction and connection with
one another. We are a social animal.

You’ve heard that you should make friends with wealthy people if you want to be wealthy
because the technique works. If you want to be happy, you make friends with happy people. If
you want to be confident, you make friends with confident people. If you want to be funny, you
make friends with funny people. Being around people you want to be like is a secret of self-
transformation to stimulate that emotional desire needed for growth. Athletes are able to play
their sport better upon watching superior athletes excel in their sport through the magic of
transference. Observance creates transference. You come to pick-up the characteristics you see in
others because they infect you with their style, knowledge, and emotions.

Observance creates transference.

Whether you intend to be infected by someone or not is irrelevant because mirror neurons are
responsible for imitating other people. You don’t make a choice as to what you are exposed to
that causes your mirror neurons to fire; it’s an automatic process. Our parents told us to avoid
hanging out with the wrong people for a reason. “People are like dirt.” said the classical Greek
philosopher Plato. “They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt
your growth and make you wilt and die.” It is reality that you come to absorb the characteristics
of people you observe.

Put yourself in a group where the individuals are depressed and you will become depressed. Put
yourself in a group where the individuals blame others and you will come to blame others.

Mirror neurons are not all bad news. Mirror neurons do not have to be the only source of
influence on your mood or way of thinking. You can still be with depressed, blame-filled, or
prejudiced individuals without taking on their characteristics. Therapists, social workers, and
doctors are just a few people who need to work with people in the “don’t infect me with your
emotional disease” category. Even so, people in such professions and positions will have a
harder time in making themselves immune from emotional diseases because mirror neurons are a
part of the brain every moment of our lives.

The Brain’s Low Road and High Road

While emotional contagion is an important part in transforming yourself to who you want to be,
it is important that you don’t rely on other people to make you feel good. Letting the emotional
parts of your brain – mostly the almond-shaped amygdala, which is located near both sides of
your temples – roam like a child on the streets is dangerous. Neuroscientists say that you can
control emotional responses – to a certain extent.

When our ancestors were faced with a dangerous predator, they had to make a quick decision, an
emotional response void of time-consuming rationalization that puts the person’s life at risk.
Their eyes would widen and pupils dilate to visually take-in more information. They receive a
shot of adrenaline to increase the supply of oxygen and glucose to muscles for strength and
speed. Unnecessary bodily functions like digestion becomes suppressed. Additionally, the brain
detours the slow responding high road – taking the low road to produce a quick response. Going
straight to the more primitive amygdala produces reflexive, unconscious decisions. It is these
primitive parts of the brain that neuroscientists say is difficult to change.

One low road response could be your reaction to a loud bang. The loud sound causes all the
adrenaline responses mentioned earlier – such as widened eyes, dilated pupils, increased supply
of oxygen – in the first few milliseconds you hear the sound. You quickly look towards the
sound to rapidly figure out if the sound is a signal of danger. If you can’t see the sound, you rely
on social proof as you look at people’s faces to see their reactions and how you should respond.

In a low road response, the sensory signals bypass the cortex and go straight to the amygdala to
produce a reflexive response. If your brain puts too much emphasis on the low road in everyday
living, you would live spontaneously and quickly destroy your life from poor decision-making. If
you screamed and sprinted away each time you heard a loud bang, you would be an emotional
wreak. This is where the high road, a neurological path in your the brain, comes in to better
control your emotional responses.

As the first few seconds – or even less – pass after hearing the loud bang, you transition over to
the high road as you begin to analyze the situation. While the low road is responsible for
reflexive decisions beyond your control, the high road can jam a cognitive wedge in the low road
to better adapt and survive.

The high road is a slower response path that uses parts of the brain like the frontal cortex and the
hippocampus (your memory) to respond appropriately to stimulus. These parts of the brain are
vulnerable to neuroplasticity, physical changes of the brain. Over time your brain physically
shapes itself as it learns that all loud bangs are not dangerous. A cooking saucepan dropping on
the hard kitchen floor doesn’t automatically make you run to the neighbors for help. (I
recommend you grab Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence to better understand the neuroscience
behind emotions).

Shaping Your Emotional Responses

While some neuroscientists say it is impossible to control all emotional responses, due to the
brain’s low road producing a quick response for survival, you can better utilize the high road.
Thinking about an emotional response uses the prefrontal cortex of the brain to override the
signals received by the amygdala. This is where neuroscience meets personal development. One
of my favorite techniques to do this is reframing. In reframing you are changing your initial
interpretation, often a quick-response, in a situation to produce a response that is beneficial to
you and your relationships.

One of the most powerful reframes I describe in the second edition of my communication secrets
of making people like you program is positive intention framing. In positive intention framing,
you identify the positive intention relevant to the limiting situation. Let’s say you are in a serious
argument with your spouse. Most people in such an argument let: 1) the low road control the
argument as they react impulsively and later regret the things they said during the heated
disagreement, and 2) emotional contagion infect themselves with a negative mood for hours
following the argument. You can have a degree of control over impulsiveness and emotional
infections by reframing.

A positive intention reframe could identify your spouse’s yelling at you as their need to be heard,
understood, and received; instead of a personal attack. Alternatively, you could positively
reframe your spouse’s yelling as a welcomed release of their frustration so you can listen to what
concerns him or her. The purpose of this type of reframing is to help you better utilize your
mental resources without having them work against you. The reframing helps you use your
prefrontal cortex to take the high road and interpret the situation in a way that lets you act in a
resourceful manner. Because of this, reframing is proven by research to be one of the most
effective anger management techniques.

Happy people are the experts of reframing. They may not have learned reframing techniques
from a book or online article, but I guarantee you they use the technique. Happy people are
logical people. They are logical in the sense they reframe, interpret, and use their prefrontal
cortex to take the brain’s high road – and live a more fulfilling life. What happens outside of
them does not matter as their mental attitude is what matters. “Happiness doesn’t depend on any
external conditions,” said Dale Carnegie, “it is governed by our mental attitude.”
Let’s say an aggressive person is talking to someone with effective communication skills. The
effective communicator is able to defuse the aggression through their communication style even
though the emotional aggression is still received. A good communicator feels the aggression, but
they reframe their response which enables them to control their emotional contagion and
destructive low road reaction. They see it in frames such as, “Oh, he’s just trying to get me to
understand him.” or “I enjoy the problem coming to surface instead of it remaining hidden where
it eats away the relationship.” From these frames the effective communicator is able to use his or
her own mental resources very efficiently.

Happy people are logical people.

When you express anger, you give it a pathway to infect your relationships and escalate the
emotional infection. Expressing your anger gives it to someone who gives it back to you in a
greater quantity. Happy people get angry; but their anger is a momentary feeling, a function of
the low road which is later controlled by the high road. Happy people reframe their anger instead
of expressing it and letting it grow.

Shaping People’s Emotional Responses: The Emotional-Leveling Technique

We see that reframing controls our responses to the situation, but what about other people’s
responses? Are we suppose to let other people react in whatever way they happen to react? Is
there a technique we can use to uplift other people and have emotional contagion help our
relationships?

You do not need to worry about people’s responses because your response is what matters.

Generally, you do not need to worry about people’s responses because your response is what
matters. Worrying is a powerless concern for the future. That isn’t to say that people’s responses
and emotional states are irrelevant; because they are vital as you will soon see. You need to
observe people’s emotional states and adjust yourself accordingly instead of worrying about
people’s behaviors that are beyond your control.

In many cases, positiveness and forcing your emotions on an unhappy, negative, or angry
individual is more counter-productive than useful. When I was happy and smiling to the angry
police officer, he became more infuriated. Seldom does positiveness alone overrule negative
emotions. The next time someone around you is angry, look them in the eye, smile, and tell them
what a beautiful day it is. Their anger will be overpowering to your mood – making the
technique unsuccessful and possibly increasing their anger. They will likely become more angry
saying something like, “It’s a disgusting day”, with an even unhappier face.

Other times your happy attitude may change their unhappy perspective, but the technique does
not create a reliable solution that you can depend on because anger builds on itself. Anger is like
a good investment that builds on itself, though of course, it’s a harmful emotion. What is an
effective communicator to do when emotional contagion is working against him or her?
Let’s review what occurs during emotional contagion so we can convert it for our own benefit.
Emotionally destructive conversations all start out with one person injecting a state into their
conversational partner. When the conversational partner is a poor communicator who reacts
impulsively, letting his mirror neurons mimic the person’s harmful state, the two individuals
experience intensified emotions. The newly infected person becomes a carrier, reciprocating the
infection to the original carrier who’s emotional disease worsens. Once the emotional infection
has become too much for the individuals, they leave the conversation only to contaminate other
people. A simple disagreement escalates into a large – sometimes life-threatening – conflict with
innocent people. An emotional infection outbreaks.

You can probably think of other scenarios in your relationships where one person injects a bad
emotion into the relationship. The partner becomes infected and the relationship goes downhill.
It’s a downward spiraling cycle that damages relationships. On one level you need to prevent
yourself from becoming a carrier, while on the other level you need to prevent other people from
becoming carriers. Doing these two things will control emotional contagion to build happiness,
power, and healthy relationships.

When talking to a friend in need, on one hand you are faced with the challenge of empathizing
with your friend’s pain. This involves drawing yourself into your friend’s struggle, feeling the
same pain, and allowing yourself to be infected by their emotional state. Other times, you will
need to shape your friend’s pain into an emotionally empowering state. You will need to
emotionally lift-up another person from their destructive state. Being focused on personal
development and bringing out the best in yourself everyday, means you are faced with these
mood challenges.

Reframing minimizes the likelihood of becoming a carrier of a dangerous emotional virus, while
a technique I call “emotional-leveling” helps you to prevent people from remaining carriers of
destructive emotions. The emotional-leveling technique firstly adjusts your emotions to reflect
the other person’s harmful emotions, followed by slowly raising your emotions – and
simultaneously their emotions – until the person reaches your desired level.

To decontaminate harmful emotions in other people with the emotional-leveling technique, you
firstly connect at their level. This is opposite to immediately imposing a positive state on
someone in a negative state. If the person is aggressive or depressed, you should not reciprocate
their aggression or depression, but have a lower emotional level to build empathy and help them
feel more understood. Verbally fighting back at a person isn’t going to do anyone any good.

For an aggressive person, if they are walking around, you should also be walking around. If they
are talking fast, you should also talk at a fast rate. For a depressed person, you can show you are
also feeling depressed without really developing depression. Be slower in your movements,
speak softer, and have similar facial expressions as the person. Your goal is to enter their state
without escalating the problem.

Once you have connected at the person’s level, begin to raise your emotional state. Make a joke
or use a reframe on the situation. Because you are in the person’s emotional state, your reframe
will not be rejected! If you were happy and told an unhappy person who recently experienced a
break-up that they should lighten-up because their break-up is not that serious, they will reject
your reframe and hate you. On the other hand – and this is where the power of emotional-
leveling comes in – if you are also unhappy after talking with and listening to the person such
that the person knows you share the same emotional state with them, they will accept a reframe
like, “I see now that break-ups are a part of life. It’s not like everyone stays with one partner for
their entire life.”

Being at a person’s destructive emotional level allows you to bring them out of their emotional
hole. Instead of reaching down to pull them out of their emotional hole – only to have them
reject your assistance – you are jumping in the hole and letting them stand on your shoulders to
climb out.

Combining the reframing technique and the emotional-leveling technique will have you in
control of your own emotions and thoughts, as well as helping other people get in control of their
emotions and thoughts. These two techniques are great for bringing out the best in people, but
they should only be a sample of an array of conflict management techniques in your
communication bag. Having these skills will help you remove emotions you do not want
infecting your relationships.

Knowing how to decontaminate poor emotions in your relationships will give pathway to
positive emotions. Effective communication skills will present you with a profound ability to
further destroy poor emotions in your relationships. Adjusting your body language and words to
empathize with the other person and using other effective communication techniques is a great
way to improve the emotional outbreaks that damage your relationships.

Emotional contagion is a fascinating topic. You can make it work for you instead of being a
victim of it everyday. Interact with people that you want to be like. Make other people’s mirror
neurons come to mimic your rising state and their biology will force them to become like you.
Do the same for yourself and you’ll be more happier. Once you know how to adjust yourself to
fit the person’s state and use powerful reframes, you’ll be well on your way to mastering
emotions for better relationships and happiness. When you do this, you’ll be amazed at your
control over emotions and thoughts. It will seem like magic.