Is Fear Contagious? | Gross Science

When you're frightened, your heart starts to pound, You break into a sweat, and your muscles tense so you can quickly take action.

This is a classic fear response; A mechanism to protect you from something you perceive as life threatening.

But, this response may not only affect you.

It could unwittingly affect your whole community, because as scientists have discovered, fear may actually be contagious.

I'm Anna, and this is Gross Science.

If I told you to think of something contagious, you'd probably imagine a type of bacteria or virus.

But diseases aren't the only thing that can spread from person to person through contact.

In the animal kingdom, bodily secretions like sweat and tears give off signals called pheromones.

These pheromones can communicate information to other members of yours species, and there are a few different types.

One type is the Alarm pheromone.

When a social animal, like an ant or a bee, encounters a threat, it releases Alarm pheromones, which quickly alert the whole colony to the impending danger and trigger a collective response.

And ants and bees aren't alone.

Humans might do this, too.

When we're scared, we release chemicals in our sweat called chemosignals that may be contagious.

When other people smell them, they may get scared or stressed, too.

In one small study, scientists collected sweat from people's armpits after they ran on a treadmill and also after they sky-dived for the first time, which would be a pretty scary experience for most people.

When other people sniffed the treadmill sweat, nothing remarkable happened; however, when they sniffed the skydiving sweat, part of their brain called the Amygdala, which is related to emotion processing, was more active.

That means that we may not only be communicating through our speech or body language, but also through our body odor.

And the implications of this are a little unnerving, especially when you realize that today we can be stressed by things that don't cause bodily harm at all, like work or dating or the news and, potentially, pass that stress to the people close to us.

That said, body odor isn't the only way fear and anxiety spread.

Humans are social beings, and we tend to mimic the feelings of those around us.

This is called Emotional Contagion, and it can spread either positive or negative emotions through a group.

So, for instance, if you see your friend smiling, you're more likely to smile, too, and vice versa.

And now, thanks to the digital age, we can rapidly transmit these feelings on a global scale.

Certain emotions spread further and faster than others, though.

For example, one study found that the most emailed New York Times articles in a 3 months period were ones that evoke what are called high arousal emotions, like awe, anger and anxiety.

To understand the impact of this, take the Ebola scare in America.

From 2013 to 2016, the largest Ebola epidemic ever swept across West Africa, causing over 11,000 deaths.

This was a terrible human tragedy and it deserved to be covered extensively by the media.

But the way it was covered may have caused the widespread panic that erupted in the U.S. despite the relatively low threat Ebola posed to Americans.

Today, researchers are designing algorithms based on the Twitter data from the Ebola panic, so that public officials can improve the communication of emergency information in ways that are less likely to cause mass hysteria.

This might be done by using language that evokes less anger and anxiety.

And this would be beneficial for lots of reasons.

Fear and stress guide our lives in hugely important ways; From potentially influencing our political opinions to contributing to our risks of heart disease.

But what if it's too late and you've already caught some negative emotions, like fear or anger or sadness?

Well, in an article in New York Magazine, researcher Sigal Barsade, who has studied emotional contagion for 2 decades, suggests 3 simple ways to cure yourself from catching feelings.

Bleh.

First, create a distraction from the source of contagion.

This can mean shutting off your Twitter feed when it's upsetting you.

Second, project your own positive emotions back.

If you're chatting with an anxious friend, maybe they'll catch your good mood.

And the third option: speaking up.

Sometimes people project negative emotions without even realizing it.

So if a friend is spreading unwanted negative vibes, just let them know that it's bringing you down, 'cause frankly, I don't need any additional fear or anxiety in my life.

Eww.

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