SPIEGEL: This is INVISIBILIA. I'm Alix Spiegel.
MILLER: And I'm Lulu Miller.
SPIEGEL: And today we are looking at the ways in which
we are all invisibly connected to each other.
RAPSON: I'll tell you how we first started
to come across the notion of contagion.
SPIEGEL: This is Dick Rapson.
He and his wife and colleague, Elaine Hatfield,
are psychological researchers
from the University of Hawaii.
RAPSON: We were therapists for a while
— for about 15 years —
and I remember a client who came in
who was very animated.
She was talking very quickly and energetically,
but I found I started to yawn.
And Elaine started to yawn.
I wasn't tired at all.
So why were we yawning?
And what we think was going on
is that we were picking up,
underneath her cascade of words,
depression.
MILLER: That was their idea —
that the depression was somehow being telegraphed
to them nonverbally.
So they looked into it and found out that, indeed,
emotions leak out a person's face
in these very measurable, consistent ways
called microexpressions.
HATFIELD: Split-second expressions of fear...
RAPSON: Grief ...
HATFIELD: … shame ...
RAPSON: … joy ...
HATFIELD: … sadness.
MILLER: What Dick and Elaine then added
to the equation after years of research
is that one way we might contract
these emotions is through that same old dance.
Because our faces, unbeknownst to us,
actually imitate the tiny microexpressions
we see on other people
— our eyebrows bound in synchrony
with someone else's surprise,
or droop with someone else's sadness
— the strange result
is that the corresponding emotion
is produced inside us.
HATFIELD: That's right.
SPIEGEL: Because, as has now been well documented
— one of the ways that emotions are produced
is from the outside, in.
HATFIELD: We get real pale, little reflections
of what others are thinking and feeling.
SPIEGEL: And for Dick and Elaine,
the result of this realization
of learning about hundreds of experiments
in which we so readily contract each other's emotions
and thoughts and breath,
is that even though you walk around
thinking of yourself as an individual...
RAPSON: That we're each individual entities
who live in our own universe
and control our own universe,
I think that's a delusion.
Would you agree with that, Elaine?
HATFIELD: Yes, I would.
We're going to slip in
to being like the company we keep.
MILLER: It's like without quite being aware of it,
we are all one organism,
a heaving, swirling organism contracting
the feelings and thoughts of the people around us.
