A recent paper from Oxford and Birmingham universities reveals that teenagers catch moods from friends, and bad moods are more contagious than good ones. The authors - Dr Per Block, of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, and Dr Stephanie Burnett Heyes, of The University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology - hope the ground-breaking study could lead to improved understanding of teenagers’ mental health and emotional wellbeing.
Even before the pandemic changed everything, schools were stepping up their efforts on student mental health and wellbeing. As Dr. Stephanie Burnett Heyes tells me, recent lockdowns, uncertainty, and loss may well have exacerbated an already growing problem.
“In a way it's increasing divides between people who were coping well already and people who are not,” she says. “A lot of teenagers are so stressed out by all these pressures in their lives. It’s hard to generalise, but things like rates of self-harm – indicators of stress and difficulty – have been going up in recent years. Thinking about how we can harness the capacity of young people to support one another, and make sure groups have the emotional resources to cope with the negative mood is very relevant to teenagers nowadays.”
Burnett Heyes recently published a paper with her colleague, Dr Per Block, that the authors hope will lead to improved understanding of the emotional wellbeing in adolescents, and why people fall into prolonged low states. Studying two groups of musicians on short residential tours, they found that mood is contagious: teenagers ‘catch’ moods from friends, and bad moods are more contagious than good ones.
They were not surprised, but the design of their study – having students in contained groups to overcome the challenge of varying external influences – might account for the new findings. But does this mean the effect would disappear in a mixed environment such as school?
“Although the study was quite particular, we don't expect that the effect would be absent, it just might be stronger or weaker,” Burnett Heyes says. “Mood contagion is something that's been observed [before], and there's good reason to think that it possibly happens in other species.”
Individuals did not avoid unhappy peers, nor did they seek out others in a desirable or similar mood to themselves. Instead of such social selection, there was ‘mood tolerance’. Earlier research suggested that bad mood is associated with social withdrawal, but this study showed no evidence of this. Teens feeling low did not withdraw, and nor did they abandon a friend after the friend had a bad mood day.
“Other studies suggested negative mood might not be contagious because it makes the person withdraw from social contact, but in this study maybe [withdrawal] was harder because they were all working and having fun and living together on these amazing music tours,” says Burnett Heyes. “Maybe in a less cohesive group like a school, people would be able to withdraw more easily and to isolate themselves, and the negative mood might not be so contagious. On the other hand you might withdraw socially in a school, but you're still present in the classroom.”
Now that schools have returned fully, and teachers look ahead to rebuilding some of the lost learning from extended lockdowns, how might the findings affect their approach to improving student mental health and wellbeing? Does Burnett Heyes think certain down individuals have a large effect on the group as a whole?
“We looked for [the effect of individuals] and we didn't find it,” she says. “Different people have different tendencies to be in a different mood state: there was some people who were happier on average than others, but no there was no ‘mood influencer’.”
More important, she feels, is looking for group dynamics; trying to identify where low mood among several individuals could be bringing a group down.
“I think it would be interesting to look at this in a sadder or more stressed group, because you could look at tipping points,” she suggests. “If you get a group where lots of people are sad it could spiral – they could get stuck in a rut – and so it would be great to identify where that point is because that's a group where you would want to deliver interventions.”
With so much teaching having been delivered online over the last twelve months, and people increasingly turning to phones for social interaction, can schools learn anything about how they encourage students to interact with each other, and the potential power of face-to-face communication?
“We're collecting data in a different study as we speak, from undergrads in their communal houses during lockdown, to look at the differential effect of face-to-face versus mediated interactions. If you're having a negative rubbish day with your housemates, could a phone call with a family member make up for that, and what's the magnitude of the effect? Do you need two online interactions to have as big an effect as one face-to-face interaction, for example?”
Importantly, the findings show mood goes both ways. Whilst the teenagers could bring each other down, they also provide support and bring up the moods of those who are struggling. Mood does not determine popularity in the short-term.
“I thought that was so interesting. In a way we shouldn’t see the negative mood contagion as something that was bad,” says Burnett Heyes. “If the group is happy enough to absorb that negative mood, then it's kind of spreading negative mood out into small portions across the network. It could be a mechanism for social support provided others are not too emotionally vulnerable. And then there’s the positive; a happy person gets a bit less happy, but the sad person will become a bit less sad as well.”
In fact, teenagers want to help each other, and socialising with someone in a low mood is a risk most are prepared to take.
“We know there’s this high motivation amongst young people to interact, and to care for their friends, and they often support each other very generously,” Burnett Heyes says. “Making individual teenagers and groups more able to buffer each other's sad moods is maybe not possible to do, but how do we use this while protecting young people from being harmed in the process?”
Teachers are aware of the subtle influence they can have on a group of students, and are expected to set an example in their conduct and behaviour. Perhaps the same goes for their mood. If teachers are well, will this good feeling be ‘caught’ across the school community?
“I don't know whether the effect would be stronger or weaker in a network where people have different roles,” says Burnett Heyes. “But that would be so fascinating: To what extent can a teacher buffer a group’s negative mood? Does it only work for some certain types of emotion, or certain types of relationship? And then of course, what's the impact on the adult?”
If teachers are to exert such a positive influence, they might be advised not to repeat and enforce dark and negative opinions and anecdotes about the effect of the pandemic on young people. But Burnett Heyes is keen to emphasise that it is not just what we say that counts.
“If we didn't tell them that [the pandemic] was bad, and we didn't communicate negative emotion they might not catch it,” she says. “But we communicate in so many different ways than just what we say. And we don't know how the effect happened on a psychological level. It was probably a mixture of verbal communication, body language, all sorts of things, conscious and unconscious.”
Burnett Heyes is flush with further questions that have come out of her work. Would effects replicate in other less bounded adolescent groups such as schools, or at different ages? What happens when interaction is mediated rather than face-to-face? And if everyone is struggling, is it too 'risky' to connect, and under what conditions?
But for schools battling the effects of lengthy isolation, she offers some advice.
“Giving emotional support is more [difficult] than giving practical support – the cost to the supporter is higher,” she says. “There's different ways of supporting people, so I think explicitly talking to [students] about how to support each other, about social support, and about their own emotional wellbeing while supporting each other could be really relevant.”
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The study:
The study sample consisted of two groups of adolescents, 79 in total, aged 15 to 19, on short residential classical music performance tours. Each day, participants reported the top 2-6 peers they had interacted with, and rated how much they experienced each of 12 mood words on a standard 1-5 scale. They measured 1775 interactions and 4724 mood scores.
The mood contagion effect was large – individuals were 1.26x more likely to experience a particular mood state for each interaction partner that reported this mood – and bad mood was more contagious than good, with contagion accounting for 23% of variance (compared to 14% for good mood).
Connected individuals were more similar in mood, and became reciprocally more similar over time – i.e. participants first formed a tie, then their mood became more similar.
To model short-term co-evolution of mood and interaction, control for environmental influences, and to distinguish mood contagion from social selection, all individuals in a bounded group must be sampled daily.
The main limitation was sample representativeness (age, demographics, and setting), but the authors expect this to limit generalisability in terms of the magnitude of effects, but not the presence of mood contagion itself.
As Burnett Heyes says, “We had quite an optimised design for measuring this kind of thing. What we lose in representativeness of the sample we gain in control of the group and environment.”
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An edited version of the interview will appear in Teach Secondary Magazine in May 2021.