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Emotional Contagion
This past Sunday*, my 22-year-old son sent a family What’s App message: ‘Kobe Bryant died. In a helicopter crash. I’m in disbelief.’ That text started an intermittent 2-hour family chat between my husband and me here in London, our son in Chicago, and our other son at school in Boulder, Colorado. We shared our collective disbelief as the news reports were rolling in with more details. I’m not sure we had ever spoken about Kobe Bryant before. As a matter of fact, I’m sure we hadn’t. Yet his unexpected passing hit us all hard and created an opportunity that allowed us to connect and share our feelings. We reflected on how seemingly insignificant our issues are day to day…how it could all be gone without warning no matter who you are. The poignancy of seeing the tweet of Kobe congratulating Lebron James when he surpassed Kobe’s lifetime scoring record just hours before the accident…his daughter dying with him… We connected in our grief. It made me realize that historically our family What’s Apps were superficial, or more accurately, usually a request from one of the boys for money. But Sunday night, we were closer as a family across seven times zones than when we were sitting at the family dinner table together.
Emotional contagion is defined as the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in others. This happens physically — think about…
