[Fis] Emotional Contagion?

Tue Mar 11 18:41:33 CET 2025

Dear Eric, Kate, Howard, and All,

Being a physicist, and reading recent discussions, I would like to argue that there is no such thing as immaterial emotions.
At the core, emotions are material phenomena.
Likewise, relations are fundamentally material. There is no information without physical implementation, as Landauer famously argued.
Below are my five arguments on embodyment of emotional contagion.

1. Emotional Contagion is a Biological Process
Emotional contagion occurs through bodily interactions—facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, posture, and even subtle physiological signals (heart rate, breathing patterns). When one person smiles, it activates mirror neurons in the observer’s brain, prompting similar facial muscles to contract, causing measurable physical changes and subsequent shifts in emotional state.
2. Emotional Contagion is Chemically Mediated
Emotional states are directly connected to biochemical substances like oxytocin, cortisol, dopamine, and serotonin. When emotional contagion happens, it does so through these material biochemical mediators.
3. Emotional Contagion Based on Embodiment of Emotion
Emotions are not "floating" entities—they are communicated via bodily presence. The presence of a physical body expressing emotion is essential for contagion. Without physical embodiment (special facial expressions, sound, rhythm, smell, touch, posture, movements), emotional contagion does not occur. Emotions transmitted through screens (video calls) are weaker compared to face-to-face interactions precisely because physical embodiment.
4. Manipulability of Emotional Contagion
Emotional contagion can be modified or dampened pharmacologically (e.g., through anxiety-reducing drugs). If emotions were immaterial, medications wouldn't alter emotional responses. Beta-blockers reduce physical symptoms of anxiety (heartbeat, shaking), weakening emotional contagion (e.g., stage fright contagion). Antidepressants directly alter emotional contagion by stabilizing neurotransmitters.
5. Neuroscientific Evidence of Embodied Resonance
Neuroimaging clearly demonstrates activation of specific physical brain areas (mirror neuron systems, limbic system, amygdala) during emotional reactions. This direct neural activity is material. Seeing someone in pain activates similar pain circuits in the observer's brain—physically embodying the emotion in neural tissue.

How this counters the immaterial perspective?
Those who argue emotions are "immaterial" claim emotions are disconnected from the body. However, emotional contagion’s dependence on observable, biological, chemical, and neurological mechanisms refute this clearly. If emotions were immaterial, contagion wouldn’t require physical presence with related physiological processes involving chemical, or neuronal pathways.

All the best,
Gordana

PS
My arguments are the result of a long discussion with GPT-4.5, which produced 20 pages of text. These were the prompts I used:

  1.  Can you please explain emotional contagion to me?
  2.  Do you see a connection to the resonance phenomena in physics?*
  3.  What are the main differences between physical resonance and emotional contagion?
(At this point, GPT-4.5 began to explain the view that emotions, like consciousness, are subjective and therefore immaterial, while physical resonance is a material phenomenon. I argued that it confused "subjective" with "immaterial." Subjective experience is necessarily embodied and thus has a material substrate. GPT-4.5 accepted my arguments.)
  4.  Can you summarize this discussion?
Finally, I edited the summary, shortening it.
I wrote this mail and asked GPT-4.5 to check my English.
What was my contribution?
A physicist's view on emotional contagion.

* Resonance occurs when an external force or driving frequency matches the natural frequency of a system, causing the system to oscillate with greatly increased amplitude.

From: Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Eric Werner <eric.werner at oarf.org>
Organisation: OARF.org
Date: Tuesday, 11 March 2025 at 16:24
To: Howard Bloom <howlbloom at aol.com>, "fis at listas.unizar.es" <fis at listas.unizar.es>, Katherine Peil <ktpeil at outlook.com>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Emotional Contagion?

Dear Kate, Howard and All,

I have had highs in concerts and deep experiences with the Aborigines in the heart of Australia. These experiences seem to have little to do with each other.

The insight given to me by my experience in Australia evoked the thought "They are crazy over there". Where "over there" was European and American industrialized societies, their wrong path and lack of genuine meaning.

The insight given to me while blowing up balloons backstage at a Rolling Stones concert was, well,  seeing Mick Jagger from the back while he elicited the highs in his frontal audience. (My girlfriend and I didn't have tickets and tried to get in and lucked out being asked if we wanted to help backstage.) So I, the Ph.D. -logician-philosopher-computer AI scientist-developmental biologist-cancer theorist-(back at you Howard😉), worked for a time for Mick Jagger!

What is the point?: I learned more from my interaction with a 50,000 year old mind in Australia than from all the science and even Mick Jagger! It was emotion but it was more. Certainly not material.

As for the Beethoven sequence (of creating, encoding, interpreting and executing the encoding, hearing the execution, encoding and experiencing}, has interesting relations to embryonic development. Such transformations are at the heart of development and communication.

-Eric
On 3/11/25 5:48 AM, Howard Bloom wrote:
kate, your question about emotional contagion and what we can call "the cloud effect" is a good one.

about this statement, with which i deeply agree:

science is remiss if it fails to interrogate the nature and power of “faith”, given our embodied capacities for anomalous or “spiritual" experiences

i'm an atheist.  when science first grabbed hold of my soul when i was ten years old, its aspiration to me seemed to be omniscience.

spiritual experiences are real.  they may not be manifestations of god, especially to folks like me to whom there is no god.  so what the hell are they?  where do they come from? how did they evolve?  what do they mean?  what do they tell us about the nature of the cosmos that has birthed them?

in my fieldwork in mass behavior, working with people like michael jackson and prince for 20 years, i saw collective ecstasies, what emil durkheim called "collective effervescence,"  ecstatic experiences at work in audiences all over north america.

in fact, one of the jobs of my entertainers was to reliably evoke these transcendent experiences.  and in building the careers of people like Prince, it was my job to help deliver these ecstasies.  they are real.

if science can't address the question of these experiences, it abandons the aspiration to omniscience.  and it's not science.

with warmth and oomph--howard

On Monday, March 10, 2025 at 07:49:34 PM EDT, Katherine Peil <ktpeil at outlook.com><mailto:ktpeil at outlook.com> wrote:

Hello All,
The discussion about “nothing" or “something" being exchanged between speakers and listeners prompts this question: What about the phenomenon of "emotional contagion”? Do Mike Levin’s revelation about bioelectricity bear upon the concept of “subtle energy”?
Also, science is remiss if it fails to interrogate the nature and power of “faith”, given our embodied capacities for anomalous or “spiritual" experiences. Pre-emptive pejoratives are not good science, but they abound.
Kate Kauffman
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--
Dr. Eric Werner, FLS
Oxford Advanced Research Foundation
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