Continuing Ed Topics: Emotions

This next blog post in regards to continuing education topics is broader than the first topic. Not only does it relate to massage therapists as practitioners, it also relates to the human condition at large.

The big question is: are emotions contagious?

In short, the answer is yes. While, yes, we are spirits inhabiting a body as experience, it’s safe to say that our brain is also always creating an emotion during the experience. ANY experience. ALL experiences.

A point made during the course was that even being rational is considered an emotion. Upon researching the lovely web, I found that ‘rational’ is actually considered a category for emotions. Some emotions are rational, some are irrational. I’m not sure how that can even be because things become rational or irrational due to judgment, and judgment is usually formed because of an emotion…

I digress.

The class teaches that we are never not without emotion, and that emotion is what drives us for thought or movement. Emotions are what keep us alive; they’re used as signals for other animals. Threat oftentimes drives emotions.

Braintively speaking (see what I did there?), emotions are tied to the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) as well as the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight).

Apparently there was this terrible study where the sympathetic nervous systems were severed in cats to see how they responded to stimuli. The study was trying to prove that organs and/or the sympathetic nervous system generated emotion… However, these poor kitties still had emotion even with it being severed.

There was another study of when epinephrine was given to human subjects to see if the epinephrine caused an emotional response. Nope. Picking up on emotions of others in the room is what caused an emotion in the subjects, not the hormone.

According to a Psychology Today article in 2010, emotions were considered cognitive appraisal and body perception. It stated that not only were emotions contagious, but so were behaviors. I think we all have personal experiences with both.

Why does this matter to massage therapists? So much is communicated through touch. I think people come to see us not just because of how much we can retrain muscle tissue or neural impulses to help them relax, but also because, as calming practitioners, our clients literally catch the emotion we are emitting, like a signal.

You can read my first post about continuing education topics here.