Are You Experiencing Someone Else’s Emotions?

Why do you think you feel bad when you see a poor miserable homeless man in the street? Apart from feeling guilty for not helping poor people there are still some sad emotions that you will experience upon seeing anybody who suffers.

Do you know why you experience these emotions? It’s because you experienced some of the man’s pain at the moment you saw him.

We humans usually absorb some of the emotions of the person we are watching or listening to and then experience a change in our own mood even though nothing bad has happened to us, personally.

Emotions are communicated to the people we deal with

Why do you think you feel scared in horror movies when you see actors feeling scared? It’s because their emotions were communicated to you through their gestures and facial expressions.

Why do you think we like confident people? Confident people transfer their emotions to us and make us feel relaxed and calm.

On the other hand people who are anxious unconsciously transfer to us some of their anxiety and this makes us feel uneasy around them. Read the Rest of This Article »

What Animals Can Teach Us About Reaching Our Goals

You might think the reason I chose this title was to grab your attention but the truth is that several experiments* have been conducted on animals with the purpose of discovering how the brain works and how the results can be used to improve humans life – proving once more that animals are a lot more than just Man’s best friend.

Many animals have similar systems to the ones we have, and by applying the results of some of the experiments to  human beings have uncovered several methods of improving human life.

The monkeys that learned fear:

Monkeys that don’t fear snakes were introduced to some snakes while being forced to listen to loud, scary noises. Some monkeys learned to fear snakes as a result of this experiment but what’s more astonishing is that when monkeys that didn’t fear snakes were allowed to see the fear response of monkeys that fear snakes they learned how to fear snakes too!!!

Conclusion: We learn to fear things when we associate them with another event, for example a child might fear darkness after associating it with the noisy sound that happened when his mother slammed the door of a dark room.

Moreover, if a child watched an adult reacting with fear to a certain situation the child will develop fear too!! Read the Rest of This Article »